Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation

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'A Foreword by Franz Boas \

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J ^ Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University j

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'^ NEW YORK MCMXXVIII ^

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COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA

14 ith Hihbcus in her hair

T> l..(

To THE Girls of Tau

THIS BOOK IS
DEDICATED

*Ou te avatu

lene't tusitala

id te ^outou

O Teineiti ma le Aualuma

o Tail

4SH173

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I AM indebted to the generosity of the Board of Fel-
lowships in the Biological Sciences of the National Re-
search Council whose award of a fellowship made this
investigation possible. I have to thank my father for
the gift of my travelling expenses to and from the
Samoan Islands. To Prof. Franz Boas I owe the in-
spiration and the direction of my problem, the training
which prepared me to undertake such an investigation,
and the^ticism of my results.

For a co-operation which greatly facilitated the prog-
ress of my work in the Pacific, I am indebted to Dr.
^Herbert E. Gregory, Director of the B. P. Bishop Mu-

^seum and to Dr. E. C. S. Handy and Miss Stella Jones
of the Bishop Museum.

To the endorsement of my work by Admiral Stitt
and the kindness of Commander Owen Mink, U. S. N.,
I owe the co-operation of the medical authorities in
Samoa, whose assistance greatly simplified and expe-
dited my investigation. I have to thank Miss Ellen
M. Hodgson, Chief Nurse, the staff nurses, the Sa-
moan nurses, and particularly G. F. Pepe for my first
contacts and my instruction in the Samoan language.
To the hospitality, generosity, and sympathetic co-op-
eration of Mr. Edward R. Holt, Chief Pharmacist
Mate, and Mrs. Holt, I owe the four months' resi-
dence in their home which furnished me with an ab-
solutely essential neutral_base from which I could study
all the individuals in the village and yet remain

[vii]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

aloof from native feuds and lines of demarcation.

The success of this investigation depended upon the
co-operation and interest of several hundred Samoans.
To mention each one individually would be impossible.
I owe special thanks to County Chief Ufuti of Vaitogi
and to all the members of his household and to the
Talking Chief Lolo, who taught me the rudiments of
the graceful pattern of social relations which is so char-
acteristic of the Samoans. I must specially thank their
excellencies, Tufele, Governor of Manu'a, and County
Chiefs Tui Olesega, Misa, Sotoa, Asoao, andXeuL the
Chiefs Pomele, Nua, Tialigo, Moa, Maualupe, Asi,
and the Talking Chiefs Lapui and Muaoj the Samoan
pastors Solomona and lakopo, the Samoan teachers,^
Sua, Napoleon, and Etij Toaga, the wife of Sotoa,
Fa'apua'a, the Taupo of Fitiuta, Fofoa, Laula, Leauala,
and Felofiaina, and the chiefs and people of all the vil-
lages of Manu'a and their children. Their kindness,
hospitality, and courtesy made my sojourn among them
a happy onej their co-operation and interest made it
possible for me to pursue my investigation with peace
and profit. The fact that no real names are used in
the course of the book is to shield the feelings of those
who would not enjoy such publicity.

For criticism and assistance in the preparation of this
manuscript I am indebted to Dr. R. F. Benedict, Dr.
L. S. Cressman, Miss M. E. Eichelberger, and Mrs.
M. L. Loeb. j^_ j^_

The American Museum of Natural History,
March, 1928.

[viii]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREW ORD BY FRANZ BOAS,

CIh AFTER

I TN3 ^ntTrTin >j

II A DAY IN SAMOA ....

III THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

IV THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD .

V THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

VI THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY .

VII FORMAL^ SE X RELATIONS

^ Vm THE ROLE OF THE DANCE .

IX THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY
X

THE EXPERIENCE AND INJO IVIDUALITY^ OF THE
AVE&SSE' (igL

XI THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

XII MATURITY AND OLD AGE ....

XIII OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF

SAMOAN CONTRASTS ....

XIV EDUCATION FOR CHOICE ....

FACE

xiii

131

I51
185

195
234

APPENDIX

I Notes to Chapters 249

II Methodology of This Study . . . -259

III Samoan Civilisation as It Is To-day . 266

IV The Mentally Defective and the Mentally Dis-

eased 278

[ix]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPENDIX PAGU

V Materials upon Which the Analysis Is Based . 28?

a. Sample Record Sheet

b. Table I. Showing Menstrual History, Sex Experi-

ence and Residence in Pastor's Household

c. Table H. Family Structure, and Analysis of Table

d. Intelligence Tests Used

e. Check List Used in Investigation of Each Girl's

Experience.

Glossary of Native Terms Used in the Text . 295

W

ILLUSTRATIONS

WITH HIBISCUS IN HER HAIR

THE "house to meet THE STRANGEr"
REBUILDING THE VILLAGE AFTER A HURRICANE

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

i8

A CHIEF S DAUGHTER AND THE BABY OF THE HOUSE-
HOLD WHOSE YELLOW HAIR WILL SOME DAY MAKE
A chief's HEADDRESS ....

THE LOCAL PARLIAMENT IS CONVENED

A DANCING COSTUME FOR EUROPEAN TASTES

BY NAME "house OF MIDNIGHT DARKNESs"

A SPIRIT OF THE WOOD ....

IN THE BARK CLOTH COSTUME OF LONG AGO

DRESSED UP IN HER BIG SISTER's DANCING SKIRT

A TALKING CHIEF THE NATIVE MASTER OF

MONIES .

/ FAMOUS MAKER OF BARK CLOTH

CERE

52

80

I 12

I 12

122
160
160

190
190

[xi]

FOREWORD

MODERN descriptions of primitive people give us a
picture of their culture classified according to the varied
^aspects of human life. We learn about inventions,
household ^unoaiy, family and political organisation,
and j^gji gious beliefs and practices. Through a com-
parative studjTbf-these data and through information
that tells us of their growth and development, we
endeavour to reconstruct, as well as may be, the history
of each particular culture. Some anthropologists even
hope that the comparative study will reveal some tend-
encies of development that recur so often that signifi-
cant generalisations regarding the processes of cultural
growth will be discovered.

To the lay reader these studies are interesting on
account of the strangeness of the scene, the peculiar
attitudes characteristic of foreign cultures that set off
in stro- ig light our own achievements and behaviour.

However, a systematic description of human activi-
ties gives us very little insight into the mental attitudes
of the individual. His thoughts and actions appear
merely as expressions of rigidly defined cultural forms.
We learn little about his rational thinking, about his
friendships and conflicts with his fellowmen. The per-
sonal side of the life of the in dividu al is almost_eiim-

[xiii]

J.J

FOREWORD ^■■

inated in the systematic presentation of the cultural life
of the people. The picture is standardised, like a col-
lection of laws that tell us how we should behave, and
not how we behave j like rules set down defining the
style of art, but not the way in which the artist elab-
orates his ideas of beauty j like a list of inventions, anc'.
not the way in which the individual overcomes tech-
nical difficulties that present themselves.

And yet the way in which the personality reacts to
culture is a matter that should concern us deeply and
that makes the studies of foreign cultures a fruitful
and useful field of research. We are accustomed to
consider all those actions that are part and parcel of oui'
own culture, standards which we follow automatically,
as common to all mankind. They are deeply ingrained
/ in our behaviour. We are moulded in their forms so
that we cannot think but that they must be valid every-
where. I

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity td.
definite ethical standards are universal, but what con-/
stitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and ethicai
standards is not universal. It is instructive to know
that standards-differ in the most unexpected ways. It
is still more important to know how the individual .
reacts to these standards.
^ In our own civilisation the individual is beset witi i
difficulties which we are likely to ascribe to fundamentaJ
human traits. When we speak about the difficulties o.''
childhood and of adolescence, we are thinking of then x

[xiv] ,

■ J

FOREWORD

as unavoidable periods of adjustment through which
every one has to pass. The whole psycho-analytic ap-
proach is largely based on this supposition.

The anthropologist doubts the correctness of these
views, but up to this time hardly any one has taken the
pains to identif^hjmself sufficiently with a primitive
population to obtain an insight into these problems.
We feel, therefore, grateful to Miss Mead for having
undertaken to identify herself so completely with
Samoan youth that she gives us a lucid and clear pic-
ture of the joys and difficulties encountered by the
young individual in a culture so entirely different from
our own. "^i.e csults of her painstaking investigation
confirm he suspicion long held by anthropologists, that
much c *• what we ascribe to human nature '.is no more
than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our
civilisation.

Franz Boas.

[xv]

COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA

INTRODUCTION

DURING the last hundred years parents and teachers
have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for
granted. Jlhey have attempted to fit education to the
needs of the child, rather than to press the child into an
inflexible educational mould. To this new task they
have been spurred by two forces, the growth of the
S£ience of psychology, and the difficulties and malad-
justments of youth. Psychology suggesfed-that much
might be gained by a knowledge of the way in which
children developed, of the stages through which they
passed, of what the adult world might reasonably expect
of the baby of two months or the child of two years.
And the fulminations of the pulpit, the loudly voiced
laments of the conservative social philosopher, the rec-
ords of juvenile courts and social agencies all suggested
that something must be done with the period which
science had named adolescence. The spectacle of a
younger generation diverging ever more widely from
the standards and ideals of the past, cut affifFwithout
the anchorage of respected home standards or group
religious values, terrified the cautious reactionary,
tempted the radical propagandist to missionary crusades

[I]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

among the defenceless youth, and worried the least
thoughtful among us.

In American civilisation, with its many immigrant
strains, its dozens of conflicting standards of conduct,
its hundreds of religious sects, its shifting economic con-
ditions, this unsettled, disturbed status of youth was
more apparent than in the older, more settled civilisa-
tion of Europe. American conditions challenged the
psychologist, the educator, the social philosopher, to
offer acceptable explanations of the growing children's
plight. As to-day in post-war Germany, where the
younger generation has even more difficult adjustments
to make than have our own children, a great mass of
theorising about adolescence is flooding the book shop)Sj
so the psychologist in America tried to account for the
restlessness of youth. The result was works like that of
Stanley Hall on "Adolescence," which ascribed to the
period through which the children were passing, the
causes of their conflict and distress. Adolescence 'was
characterised as the period in which idealism flowered-
and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period
during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely
inevitable.

The careful child psychologist who relied upon ex-
periment for his conclusions did not subscribe to these
theories. He said, "We have no data. We know onjly
a little about the first few months of a child's life. We
are only just learning when a baby's eyes will fiii'st
follow a light. How can we give definite answers \to

[2]

INTRODUCTION

questions of how a developed personality, about which
we know nothing, will respond to religion?" But the
negative cautions of science are never popular. If the
experimentalist would not commit himself, the social
philosopher, the preacher and the pedagogue tried the
harder to give a short-cut answer. They observed the
behaviour of adolescents in our society, noted down the
omnipresent and obvious symptoms of unrest, and an-
nounced these as characteristics of the period. Mothers
were warned that "daughters in their teens" present
special problems. This, said the theorists, is a difficult
period. The physical changes which are going on in the
bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psy-
chological accompaniments. You can no more evade *
one than you can the other 3 ^ your daughter's body
changes from the body of a child to the body of a
woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that
stormily. The theorists looked about them again at
t'-^e adolescents in our civilisation and repeated with
P ceat conviction, "Yes, stormily."
?-* cSuch a view, though unsanctioned by the cautious
t jperimentalist, gained wide currency, influenced our
educational policy, paralysed our parental eflfort§» Just
as the mother must brace herself against the baby's
crying when it cuts its first tooth, so she must fortify
herself and bear with what equanimity she might the
unlovely, turbulent manifestations of the "awkward
age." If there was nothing to blame the child for,
ntiither was_ there any programme except endurance

^^

U

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

which might be urged upon the teacher. The theor'.st
continued to observe the l5eMviour of American ado-
lescents and each year lent new justification to his hy-
pothesis, as the difficulties of youth were illustrated
and documented in the records of schools and juvenile
courts.

But meanwhile another way of studying human de-
velopment had been gaining ground, the approach of
the anthropologist, the student of man in all of liis
most diverse social settings. The anthropologist, as he
pondered his growing body of material upon the cus-
toms of primitive people, grew to realise the tr_eip.§itt-
dous-jgle played, in an individuaPs life by the ^ocjal
environment^ in which each is born and reared. ~One
by one, aspectS-oi behaviour which we had been accus-
tomed to consider invariable complements of our hu-
manity were found to be merely a result of civilisation,
present in the inhabitants of one country, absent, in an-
other country, and this without a change of race. F)(e^
learned that neither race nor common humanity caft-^e,
held responsible for many of the forms which ev/^i
such basic human emotions as love and fear and angilr
take under different social conditions. j

So the anthropologist, arguing from his observatioius
of the behaviour of adult human beings in other civi-
lisations, reaches many of the same conclusions wliidh
the behaviourist reaches in his wo7t^upoh~humanT3aBi7es
who have as yet no civilisation to shape their malleabjje
humanity.

[4]

INTRODUCTION

With such an attitude towards human nature the
anthropologist listened to the current comment upon
adolescence. He heard attitudes which seemed to him
dependent upon social environment — such as rebellion
against authority, philosophical perplexities, the flower-
ing of idealism, conflict and struggle — ascribed to a
^period of physical development. And on the basis of
his knowledge of the determinism of culture, of the
plasticity of human beings, he doubted. Were these
difiiculties due to being adolescent or to being adoles-
ce nt in Amer ica ?

For the biologist who doubts an old hypothesis or
wishes to test out a new one, there is the biological
laboratory. There, under conditions over which he can
exercise the most rigid control, he can vary the light,
the air, the food, which his plants or his animals re-
ceive, from the moment of birth throughout their life-
time. Keeping all the conditions but one constant, he q^
can make accurate measurement of the effect of the ^^
one. This is the ideal method of science, the method "^jJ^tJ
of the- controlled experiment, through which all hy- -^ '^ '
potheses may be submitted to a strict objective test. '

Even the student of infant psychology can only par-

tially reproduce thesejdeal laboratory conditions. He
cnnnot j:ontrol the pre-natal environment of the child
whom he will later subject to objective ineasuremeht.
.rie can, however, control the early environment of the
iihiH, the first few days of its existence, and decide
what sounds and sights and smells and tastes are to

Ci]

COMING OF AG^ IN SAMOA

impinge upon it. But for the student of the adoles-
cent there is no such simplicity of working conditions.
What -We. wish to test is no less than the effect of civili-
sation upon a developing human being at the age'^of
puberty. To test it most rigorously we would have to
construct various sorts of different civilisations and sub-
ject large numbers of adolescent children to these dif-
, ferent environments. We would list the influences the
I effects of which we wished to study. If we wished to
study the influence of the size of the family, we would
construct a series of civilisations alike in every respect
except in family organisation. Then if we found dif-
ferences in the behaviour of our adolescents we could
say with assurance that size of family had caused the
difference, that, for instance, the only child had a more
troubled adolescence than the child who was a member
of a large family. And so we might proceed through
a dozen possible situations — early or late sex knowl-
edge, early or late sex-experience, pressure towards pre-
cocious development, discouragement of precocious de-
velopment, segregation of the sexes or coeducation (
from infancy, division of labour between the sexes or
common tasks for both, pressure to make religious
choices young or the lack of such pressure. We would
vary one factor, while the others remained quite con-
stant, and analyse which, if any, of the aspects of our
civilisation were responsible for the difficulties of oui*'^
children at adolescence. — -^ I

Unfortunately, such ideal methods of experiment'

[6] 1

INTRODUCTION

are denied to us when our materials are humanity and
the whole fabric of a social order. The test colony of
Herodotus, in which babies were to' be isolated and the
results recorded, is not a possible approach. Neither
is the method of selecting from our own civilisation
groups of children who meet one requirement or an-
other. Such a method would be to select five hundred
adolescents from small families and five hundred from
large families, and try to discover which had experi-
enced the greatest difficulties of adjustment at adoles-
cence. But we could not know what were the other
influences brought to bear upon these children, what
effect their knowledge of sex or their neighbourhood
environment may have had upon their adolescent de-
velopment.

What method then is open to us who wish to con-
duct a human experiment but who lack the power either
to construct the experimental conditions or to find con-
trolled examples of those conditions here and there
throughout our own civilisation? The only method is
that^of the anthropologist, to go to a^ -different civilisa-
tion and make a. study of human beings under different
cultural ^conditions in . SiiQie_x»ih£iL part _of the world.
For such studies the anthropologist chooses quite sim-
p] I peoples, primitive peoples, whose society has never
at^ined the complexity of our own.^ In this choice of
primitive peoples like the Eskimo, the Australian, the
South Sea islander, or the Pueblo Indian, the anthro-
pologist is guided by the knowledge that the analyg[s

[7]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

V of a simpler civilisation is more possible of attainment.

' In complicated civilisations like those of Europe, or

the higher civilisations of the East, years ol. study are

necessary before the student can begin to understand

"{he forces at work within them. A study of the French

family alone would involve a preliminary study of

French history, of French law, of the Catholic and

^ ^Protestant attitudes towards sex and personal relations.

^. . jp\. primitive people without a written language present

^r Ta much less elaborate problem and a trained student

vv"* I can master the fundamental structure of a primitivfeg^

society m a lew months. ^ \\

fP

Ml

Furthermore, we do not choose a simple peasant
community in Europe or an isolated group of moun-
ain whites in the American South, for these people's
ays of life, though- simple, belong essentially to the
istorical tradition to which the complex parts of Eu-
opean or American civilisation belong. Instead, we
!♦. choose primitive groups who have had thousands of
■years of historical development along com.pletely dif-
U^ferent lines from our own, whose language does not
■.possess_our Indo-European categories, whose religious
ideas are of a different nature, whose social organisa-
tion is^ not onIy~srmpler but yery"different from our
ownr~F*fom~ these contrasts, which are vividT enough
to startle and enlighten those accustomed to our o'' /n
way_of life and simple en ough, to.be grasped guicklj^,
it is possible to learn many things about the effect ol
a civilisation upon the individuals within it.

[8] " 1

INTRODUCTION

So, in order to investigate the particular problem, I
chose to go not to Germany or to Russia, but to Samoa,
a South Sea island about thirteen degrees from the
Equator, inhabited by a brown Polynesian people. Be-
cause I was a woman and could hope for greater in-
timacy in working with girls rather than with boys, and
because owing to a paucity of women ethnologists our
knowledge of primitive girls is far slighter than our
knowledge of boys, I chose to concentrate upon the
•adolescent girl in Samoa.

But in concentrating, I did something very different
Prom what I would do if I concentrated upon a study
of the adolescent girl in Kokomo, Indiana. In such a
study, I would go right to the crux of the problem j I
would not have to linger long over the Indiana lan-
guage, the table manners or sleeping habits of my sub-
jects, or make an exhaustive study of how they learned
to dress themselves, to use the telephone, or what the
concept of conscience meant in Kokomo. All these
things are the general fabric of American life, known
to me as investigator, known to you as readers.

But with this new experiment on the primitive ado-
lescent girl the matter was quite otherwise. She spoke a
language the very sounds of which were strange, a lan-
guage in which nouns became verbs and verbs nouns in
the most sleight-of-hand fashion. All of her habits
of life were different. She sat cross-legged on the
ground, and to sit upon a chair made her stiff and mis-
erable. She ate with her fingers from a woven plate j

[9]

»1

/

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

she slept upon the floor. Her house was a mere circle
of pillars, roofed by a cone of thatch, carpeted with
water-worn coral fragments. Her whole material en-
vironment was different. Cocoanut palm, breadfruit,
and mango trees swayed above her village. She had
never seen a horse, knew no animals except the pig,
dog and rat. Her food was taro, breadfruit and ba-
nanas, fish and wild pigeon and half-roasted pork, and
land crabs. And just as it was necessary to understand
this physical environment, this routine of life which
was so different from ours, so her social environment
in its attitudes towards children, towards sex, towards
personality, presented as strong a contrast to the social
environment of the American girl..

I concentrated upon the girls of the community. I
spent the greater part of my time with them. I studied
most closely the households in which adolescent girls
lived. I spent more time in the games of children than
in the councils of their elders. Speaking their lan-
guage, eating their food, sitting barefoot and cross-
legged upon the pebbly floor, I did my best to mini-
mise the differences between us and to learn to know
and understand all the girls of three little villages on
the coast of the little island of Tau, in the Manu'a
Archipelago.

Through the nine months which I spent in Samoa,
I gathered many detailed facts about these girls, the
size of their families, the position and wealth of their
parents, the number of their brothers and sisters, 'vhe
amount of sex experience which they had had. AH of.

[lO]

INTRODUCTION

these routine facts are summarised in a table in the
appendix. They are only the barest skeleton, hardly
the raw materials for a study of family situations and
sex relations, standards of friendship, of loyalty, of
personal responsibility, all those impalpable storm cen-
tres of disturbances in the lives of our adolescent girls.
•<?\.nd because these less measurable parts of their lives
were so similar, because one girl's life.w'as so niuch_like-.
another's, in an uncomplex, uniform culture like Samoa,
I^feel justified in generalising although I studied only
fifty girls in three small neighbouring villages.

In the following chapters I have described the lives
of these girls, the lives of their younger sisters who
will soon be adolescent, of their brothers with whom
a strict taboo forbids them to speak, of their older sis-
ters who have left puberty behind them, of their elders,
the mothers and fathers whose attitudes towards life
determine the attitudes of their children. And through
this description I have tried to answei^he question
which sent me to' Samoa: Are the disturbances which
vex our adolescents du e to the nature of adolescence
itself or to the civilisation j^ Under different conditions /
does adolescence present a different picture?

Also, by the nature of the problem, because of the
unfamiliarity of this simple life on a small Pacific
island, I have had to give a picture of the whole social
life of Samoa, the details being selected always with
a view to illuminating the problem of adolescence.
Matters of political organisation which neither interest"^
ncr influence the young girl are not included. Minutiae

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

of relationship systems or ancestor cults, genealogies
and mythology, which are of interest only to the spe-
cialist, will be published in another place. But I have
/triedrto present to the reader the Samoan girl in her
*,social setting, to describe the course of her life from
birth until death, the problems she will have to solve,
the values which will guide her in her solutions, the
pains and pleasures of her human lot cast on a South
Sea island^

Such a description seeks to do more than illuminate
this particular problem. It should also give the reader
some conception of a different and contrasting civilisa-
tion, another way of life, which other members of the
human race have found satisfactory and gracious. We
know that our subtlest perceptions, our highest values,
are all based upon contrast 3 that light without darkness
or beauty without ugliness would lose the qualities
which they now appear to us to have. And similarly,
if we would appreciate our own civilisation, this elabo-
rate pattern of life which we have made for ourselves
as a people and which we are at such pains to pass on
to our children, we must set our civilisation over against
other very different ones. The traveller in Europe
returns to America, sensitive to nuances in his own
manners and philosophies which have hitherto gone
unremarked, yet Europe and America are parts of one
civilisation. It is with variations within one great p;'t-
tern that the student of Europe to-day or the student
of our own history sharpens his sense of appreciatif^'n*
But if we step outside the stream of Indo-Europ'^an

[12] I

INTRODUCTION

culture, the appreciation which we can accord our civili-
sation is even more enhanced. Here in remote parts
of the world, under historical conditions very different
from those which made Greece and Rome flourish and
fall, groups of human beings have worked out patterns
of life so different from our own that we cannot ven-
ture any guess that they would ever have arrived at
our solutions. /E^zh. primitive people has selected one
set of human gifts, one set of human values, and fash-
ioned for themselves an art, a social organisation, a re-
ligion, which is their unique contribution to the history
of the human spirit, v

Samoa is only one of these diverse and gracious
patterns, but as the traveller who has been once from
home is wiser than he who has never left his own door
step, so a knowledge of one other culture should
sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to ap-
preciate more lovingly, our own.

And, because of the particular problem which we set
out to answer, this tale of another way of life is
mainly concerned with education, with the process by
which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human
scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or
her society. The strongest light will fall upon the
ways in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense,
differs from our own. And from this contrast we may
be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious
and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion
differently the education we give our children.

[13]

II

A DAY IN SAMOA

THE life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon
has shown until daylight, the shouts of the young men
may be heard before dawn from the hillside. Uneasy
in the night, populous with ghosts, they shou> lustily)
to one another as they hasten with their work. As the
dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and
the slender palm trees jtand out against a colourless,
^^^leaming^a, Tovers'slip home from trysts beneath the
palm trees or in the shadow of Reached canoes, that the
light may find each sleeper in. his appointed place.
Cocks crow, negligently, and a^iiimrill-volced bird cries
from the breadfruit trees. The insistent roar of the
reef seems muted to an undertone for the sounds of
a waking village. Babies cry, a few short wails before
sleepy mothers give them the breast. Restless little
children roll out of their sheets and wander drowsily
down to the beach to freshen their faces in the sea.
Boys, bent upon an early fishing, start collecting their
tackle and go to rouse their more laggard companions.
Fires are lit, here and there, the white smoke hardly
visible against the paleness of the dawn. The "w hole
village, sheeted and frowsy, stirs, rubs its eyes, and
stumbles towards the beach. "Talofa!" "Talofa!"

[14]

A DAY IN SAMOA

"Will the journey start to-day?" "Is it bonito fishing
your lordship is going?" Girls stop to giggle over some
young ne'er-do-well who escaped during the night from
an angry father's pursuit and to venture a shrewd guess
that the daughter knew more about his presence than
she told. The boy who is taunted by another, who has
succeeded him in his sweetheart's favour, grapples with
his rival, his foot slipping in the wet sand. From the
other end of the village comes a long drawn-out, pierc-
ing wail. A messenger has just brought word of the
death of some relative in another village. Half-clad,
unhurried women, with babies at their breasts, or astride
their hips, pause in their tale of Losa's outraged de-
parture from her fathers house to thegreater kindness
in the home of her undo, to wonder who is dead. Poor
relatives whisper thqfrrequests to rich relatives, men
make plans to set a nsh trap together, a woman begs
a bit of yellow dye from a kinswoman, and through
the village sounds the rhythmic tattoo which calls the
young men together. They gather from all parts of
the village, digging sticks in hand, ready to start inland
to the plantation. The older men set off upon their
more lonely occupations, and each household, reassem-
bled under its peaked roof, settles down to the routine
of the morning. Little children, too hungry to wait
for the late breakfast, beg lumps of cold taro which
they munch greedily. Women carry piles of washing
to the sea or to the spring at the far end of the village,
or set off inland after weaving materials. The older

[15]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

girls go fishing on the reef, or perhaps set themselves
to weaving a new set of Venetian blinds.

In the houses, where the pebbly floors have been
swept bare with a stiff long-handled broom, the women
great with child and the nursing mothers, sit and gossip
with one another. Old men sit apart, unceasingly
twisting palm husk on their bare thighs and muttering
old tales under their breath. The carpenters begin
work on the new house, while the owner bustles about
trying to keep them in a good humour. Families who
will cook to-day are hard at workj the taro, yams and
bananas have already been brought from inland j the
children are scuttling back and forth, fetching sea
water, or leaves to stuff the pig. As the sun rises
higher in the sky, the shadows deepen under the
thatched roofs, the sand is burning to the touch, the
hibiscus flowers wilt on the hedges, and little children
bid the smaller ones, "Come out of the sun." Those
whose excursions have been short return to the village,
the women with strings of crimson jelly fish, or baskets
of shell fish, the men with cocoanuts, carried in baskets
slung on a shoulder pole. The women and children
eat their breakfasts, just hot from the oven, if this is
cook day, and the young men work swiftly in the mid-
day heat, preparing the noon feast for their elders.

It is high noon. The sand burns the feet of the
little children, who leave their palm leaf balls and
their pin-wheels of frangipani blossoms to wither in
the sun, as they creep into the shade of the houses. The

[i6]

A DAY IN SAMOA

women who must go abroad carry great banana leaves
as sun-shades or wind wet cloths about their heads.
Lowering a few blinds against the slanting sun, all who
are left in the village wrap their heads in sheets and
go to sleep. Only a few adventurous children may
slip away for a swim in the shadow of a high rock,
some industrious woman continue with her weaving,
or a close little group of women bend anxiously over
a woman in labour. The village is dazzling and deadj
any sound seems oddly loud and out of place. Words
have to cut through the solid heat slowly. And then
the sun gradually sinks over the sea.

A second time, the sleeping people stir, roused per-
haps by the cry of "a boat," resounding through the
village. The fishermen beach their canoes, weary and
spent from the heat, in spite of the slaked lime on their
heads, with which they have sought to cool their brains
and redden their hair. The brightly coloured fishes are
spread out on the floor, or piled in front of the houses
until the women pour water over them to free them
from taboo. Regretfully, the young fishermen sepa-
rate out the "Taboo fish," which must be sent to the
chief, or proudly they pack the little palm leaf baskets
with offerings of fish to take to their sweethearts.
Men come home from the bush, grimy and heavy
laden, shouting as they come, greeted in a sonorous
rising cadence by those who have remained at home.
They gather in the guest house for their evening kava
drinking. The soft clapping of hands, the high-

[17]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

pitched intoning of the talking chief who serves the
kava echoes through the village. Girls gather flowers
to weave into necklaces j children, lusty from their
naps and bound to no particular task, play circular
games in the half shade of the late afternoon. Finally
the sun sets, in a flame which stretches from the moun-
tain behind to the horizon on the sea, the last bather
comes up from the beach, children straggle home, dark
little figures etched against the skyj lights shine in the
houses, and each household gathers for its evening
meal. The suitor humbly presents his offering, the
children have been summoned from their noisy play,
perhaps there is an honoured guest who must be served
first, after the soft, barbaric singing^_f_ C hristian hym ns
and the brief and graceful evening prayer. In front
of a house at the end of the village, a father cries out
the birth of a son. In some family circles a face is
missing, in others little runaways have found a haven!
Again quiet settles upon the village, as first the head
of the household, then the women and children, and
last of all the patient boys, eat their supper.

After supper the old people and the little children
are bundled off to bed. If the young people have
guests the front of the house is yielded to them. For
day is the time for the councils of old men and the
labours of youth, and night is the time for lighter
things. Two kinsmen, or a chief and his councillor, sit
and gossip over the day's events or make plans for the
morrow. Outside a crier goes through the village an-

[i8]

'4

•..ti

/'//;• " tl'jiise t'j ?tteet the Stra/i'ier"

.Hik ' wssn

Rebu:.

A DAY IN SAMOA

nouncing that the communal breadfruit pit will be
opened in the morning, or that the village will make
a great fish trap. If it is moonlight, groups of young
men, women by twos and threes, wander through the
village, and crowds of children hunt for land crabs or
chase each other among the breadfruit trees. Half the
village may go fishing by torchlight and the curving
reef will gleam with wavering lights and echo with
shouts of triumph or disappointment, teasing words or
smothered cries of outraged modesty. Or a group of
youths may dance for the pleasure of some visiting
maiden. Many of those who have retired to sleep,
drawn by the merry music, will wrap their sheets about
them and set out to find the dancing. A white-clad,
ghostly throng will gather in a circle about the gaily
lit house, a circle from which every now and then a
few will detach themselves and wander away among
the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the
village until long past midnight j then at last there is
only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper
of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.

[19]

Ill

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

BIRTHDAYS are of little account in Samoa. But for
the birth itself of the baby of high rank, a great feast
will be held, and much property given away. The first
baby must always be born in the mother's village and
if she has gone to live in the village of her husband,
she must go home for the occasion.\ For several months
before the birth of the child the father's relatives have
brought gifts of food to the prospective mother, while
the mother's female relatives have been busy making
pure white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving
dozens of tiny pandanus mats which form the layette.
The expectant mother goes home laden with food gifts
and when she returns to her husband's family, her
family provide her with the exact equivalent iq^ mats
and bark cloth as a gift to them. At theylbirth j/tself
the father's mother or sister must be present to care for
the new-born baby while the midwife and the relatives
of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about
a birth. Convention dictates that the mother should
neither writhe, nor cry out, nor inveigh against the
presence of twenty or thirty people in the house who
sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and play-
ing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh

[20]

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to
fall off, the signal for a feast. If the baby is a girl,
the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the
tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her -S^-^
growing up to be industrious at household tasks j for \C^^
a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skjlled
fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him
industry in farming, y Then the visitors go home, the
mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and thq
new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one.\
The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten i;^^-.
Its first steps or first word are remarked without exu-
berant comment, without ceremony. It has lost all
ceremonial importance and will not regain it again
until after puberty j in most Samoan villages a girl.-'^
will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And
even the mother remembers only that Losa is older
than Tupu, and that her sister's little boy, Fale, j
younger than her brother's child, Vigo. Relative, agf
is of great importance, for the elder may always com-
mand the younger — until the positions of adult life
upset the arrangement — but actual age may well be
forgotten'i^

Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where
the mother's milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among
the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given
other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juice j
the food is either masticated by the mother and then
put into the baby's mouth on her finger, or if it is

[21]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the
child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned
lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and
there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman
expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is
two or three years old, as the simplest device for paci-
fying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as
long as they are at the breast j after weaning they are
usually handed over to the care of some younger girl
in the household. They are bathed frequently with
the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut
oil until their skins glisten.

/The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or
seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six
months old, but who can carry the child straddling the
left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six
or seven months of age will assume this straddling
position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminu-
tive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies
who can walk about are more complicated charges.
They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give
the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw
two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months
old, and my Impression is that the average age is about
a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within
a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages
crawling, and children under three or four years of
age optionally crawl or walk.

From birth "^^-j *-^^ ^g^rfr^*^^ ^r fiir^ o child's

[22]

J

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

education is^exceedinglY simple. They must be house-
broken, a matter made more difficult by an habitual
indifference to the activities of very small children.
They must learn to sit or crawl within the house and
never to stand upright unless it is absolutely necessary;
never to address an adult in a standing position; to stay
out of the sun J not to tangle the strands of the weaver j
not to scatter the cut-up cocoanut which is spread out
to dry J to keep their scant loin cloths at least nominally
fastened to their persons j to treat fire and knives with
proper caution j not to touch the kava bowl, or the kava
cup J and, if their father is a chief, not to crawl on his
bed-place when he is by. These are reallyfsimply^a^
series of avoidances, enforced by occasional cuffings andj
a deal of exasperated shouting and ineffectual conver^J
sation.

The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the t
next oldest child, who learns to shout, "Come out ofj
the sun," before she has fully appreciated the necessity
of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and
boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age
these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have
become an inseparable part of their conversation, a
monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their com-
ments. ..I have known them to intersperse their re-
marks every two or three minutes with, "Keep still,"
"Sit still," "Keep your mouths shut," "Stop that noise,"
uttered quite mechanically although all of the little
ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a

[23]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last re-
quirement o£.5ilence is contmually mentioned and never
enforced. The little nurses are more interested in
-^eace than in forming the characters of their small
charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply
/yrdragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will
y 1^*1 ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an
tolder one can be made responsible. -^

If small families of parents and children prevailed
in Samoa, this system would result in making half of
the population solicitous and self-sacrificing and the
other half tyrannous and self-indulgent. But just as
a child is getting old enough so that its wilfulness is
becoming unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon
it, and the whole process is repeated again, each child
being disciplined and socialised through responsibility
for a still younger oner'^

This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting
from a child's crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds
of the older children that long after there is any need
for it, they succumb to some little tyrant's threat of
making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into
expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into
weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and
cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves
or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to
be washed — all because an older boy or girl has be-
come so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an
outcry. ,

[24] \

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

This method of giving in, coaxing, bribing, diverting
the infant disturbers is only pursued within the house-
hold or the relationship group, where there are duly
constituted elders in authority to punish the older chil-
dren who can't keep the babies still. Towards a neigh-
bour's children or in a crowd the half-grown girls and
boys and even the adults vent their full irritation upon
the heads of troublesome children. If a crowd of chil-
dren are near enough, pressing in curiously to watch
some spectacle at which they are not wanted, they are
soundly lashed with palm leaves, or dispersed with a
shower of small stones, of which the house floor always
furnishes a ready supply. This treatment does not
seem actually to improve the children's behaviour, but
merely to make them cling even closer to their fright-
ened and indulgent little guardians. It may be sur-
mised that stoning the children from next door pro-
vides a most necessary outlet for those who have spent
so many weary hours placating their own young rela-
tives. And even these bursts of anger are nine-tenths
gesture. No one who throws the stones actually means
to hit a child, but the children know that if they repeat
their intrusions too often, by the laws of chance some
of the flying bits of coral will land in their faces.
Even Samoan dogs have learned to estimate the pro-
portion of gesture that there is in a Samoan's "get out
of the house." They simply stalk out between one set
of posts and with equal dignity and all casualness stalk
in at the next opening.

[25]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

By the time a child is six or seven she has all the
essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted
with the care of a younger child. And she also de-
velops a number of simple techniques. , She learns to
weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make
pin-wheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to
climb a cocoanut tree by walking up the trunk on flex-
ible little feet, to break open a cocoanut with one firm
well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to
play a number of group games and sing the songs which
go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter
on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to
spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when
rain threatens, to roll the pandanus leaves for weaving,
to go to a neighbouring house and bring back a lighted
fagot for the chief's pipe or the cook-house fire, and to
exercise tact in begging slight favours from relatives.

But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks
are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-
tending. Very small boys also have some care of the
younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they
are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have
not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger
children are worn off by their contact with older boys.
For little boys are admitted t-) interesting and important
activities only so long as their behaviour is circumspect
and helpful. Where small girls are brusquely pushed
aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they
become adept at making themselves useful. The four

[26]

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

or five little boys who all wish to assist at the impor-
tant business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels,
organise themselves into a highly efficient working
teamj one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra
lasso, others poke eagerly about in holes in the reef
looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured
eels into his lavalava. The small girls , burdened with ,,-
heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are
too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the
hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older
ones, h ave litt le opportunity for learning the more ad-
venturous forms of work and play. So while the little
boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending
and then have many opportunities to learn effective co-
operation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' '
education is less comprehensive. They have a high
standard of individual responsibility but the community |
provides them with no lessons in co-operation with one I
another. This' is particularly apparent in the activities ■•
of young people J the boys organise quickly; the girls
waste hours in bickering, innocent of any technique for
quick and efficient co-operation.

And as the woman who goes fishing can only get
away by turning the babies over to the little girls of
the household, the little girls cannot accompany their
aunts and mothers. So they learn even the simple
processes of reef fishing much later than do the boys.
They are kept at the baby-tending, errand-running
stage until they are old enough and robust enough to

[27]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

work on the plantations and carry foodstuffs down to
the village.

A girl is given these more strenuous tasks near the
age of puberty, but it is purely a question of her phys-
ical size and ability to take responsibility, rather than
of her physical maturity. Before this time she has
occasionally accompanied the older members of the
family to the plantations if they were willing to take
the babies along also. But once there, while her
brothers and cousins are collecting cocoanuts and rov-
ing happily about in the bush, she has again to chase
and shepherd and pacify the ubiquitous babies.
^■As soon as the girls are strong enough to carry heavy
loads, it pays the family to shift the responsibility for
the little children to the younger girls and the adoles-
cent girls are released from baby-tending. It may be
said with some justice that the worst period of their
"^ I lives is over. Never again will they be so incessantly
\ at the beck and call of their elders, never again so
^tyrannised over by two-year-old tyrants. All the irri-
tating, detailed routine of housekeeping, which in our
civilisation is accused of warping the souls and souring
the tempers of grown women, is here performed by
children under fourteen years of age. A fire or a pipe
to be kindled, a call for a drink, a lamp to be lit, the
baby's cry, the errand of the capricious adult — these
haunt them from morning until night. With the in-
troduction of several months a year of government
schools these children are being taken out of their

[28]

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

homes for most of the day. This brings about a com-
plete disorganisation of the native households which
have no precedents for a manner of life where mothers
have to stay at home and take care of their children
and adults have to perform small routine tasks and
run errands.
. Before their release from baby-tending the little
girls have a very limited knowledge of any of the
more complicated techniques. Some of them can do
the simpler work in preparing food for cooking, such
as skinning bananas, grating cocoanuts, or scraping
taro. A few of them can weave the simple carrying
basket. But now they must learn to weave all their
own baskets for carrying supplies j learn to select taro
leaves of the right age for cooking, to dig only mature
taro. In the cook-house they learn to make palusami,
to grate the cocoanut meat, season it with hot stones,
mix it with sea water and strain out the husks, pour
this milky mixture into a properly made little container
of taro leaves from which the aromatic stem has been
scorched off, wrap these In a breadfruit leaf and fasten
the stem tightly to make a durable cooking jacket.
They must learn to lace a large fish into a palm leaf,
or roll a bundle of small fish in a breadfruit leaf j to
select the right kind of leaves for stuffing a pig, to
judge when the food in the oven of small heated stones
is thoroughly baked. Theoretically the bulk of the
cooking is done by the boys and where a girl has to
do the heavier work, it is a matter for comment:

[29]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

"Poor Losa, there are no boys in her house and always
she must make the oven." But the girls always help
and often do a great part of the work.

Once they are regarded as individuals who can de-
vote a long period of time to some consecutive activity,
girls are sent on long fishing expeditions. . They learn
to weave fish baskets, to gather and arrange the bundles
of fagots used in torch-light fishing, to tickle a devil
fish until it comes out of its hole and climbs obediently
upon the waiting stick, appropriately dubbed a "come
hither stick" j to string the great rose-coloured jelly-
fish, loley a name which Samoan children give to candy
also, on a long string of hibiscus bark, tipped with a
palm leaf rib for' a needle j to know good fish from
bad fish, fish that are in season from fish which are
dangerous at some particular time of the yearj and
never to take two octopuses, found paired on a rock,
lest bad luck come upon the witless fisher.

Before this time their knowledge of plants and trees
is mainly a play one, the pandanus provides them with
seeds for necklaces, the palm tree with leaves to weave
balls J the banana tree gives leaves for umbrellas and
half a leaf to shred into a stringy "choker" j cocoanut
shells cut in half, with cinet strings attached, make a
species of stilt j the blossoms of the Pua tree can be
sewed into beautiful necklaces. Now they must learn
to recognise these trees and plants for more serious
purposes j they must learn when the pandanus leaves
are ready for the cutting and how to cut the long leaves

[30]

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

with one sure quick stroke j they must distinguish be-
tween the three kinds of pandanus used for different
grades of mats. The pretty orange seeds which made
such attractive and also edible necklaces must now be
gathered as paint brushes for ornamenting bark cloth.
Banana leaves are gathered to protect the woven plat-
ters, to wrap up puddings for the oven, to bank the
steaming oven full of food. Banana, bark must be
stripped at just the right point to yield the even, pliant,
black strips, needed to ornament mats and baskets.
Bananas themselves must be distinguished as to those
which are ripe for burying, or the golden curved banana
ready for eating, or bananas ready to be sun-dried for
making fruit-cake rolls. Hibiscus bark can no longer
be torn off at random to give a raffia-like string for a
handful of shells j long journeys must be made inland
to si^ect bark of the right quality for use in weaving.
\.^ln the house the girPs principal task is to learn to
weave. She has to master several different techniques.
First, she learns to weave palm branches where the
central rib of the leaf serves as a rim to her basket or
an edge to her mat and where the leaflets are already
arranged for weaving. From palm leaves she first
learns to weave a carrying basket, made of half a leaf,
by plaiting the leaflets together and curving the rib
into a rim. Then she learns to weave the Venetian
blinds which hang between the house posts, by laying
one-half leaf upon another and plaiting the leaflets
together. More difficult are the floor mats, woven of

[31]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

four great palm leaves, and the food platters with their
intricate designs. There are also fans to make, simple
two-strand weaves which she learns to make quite well,
more elaborate twined ones which are the prerogative
of older and more skilled weavers. Usually some
older woman in the household trains a girl to weave
and sees to it that she makes at least one of each kind
of article, but she is only called upon to produce in
quantity the simpler things, like the Venetian blinds.
From the pandanus she learns to weave the common
floor mats, one or two types of the more elaborate bed
mats, and then, when she is thirteen or fourteen, she
begins her first fine mat. The fine mat represents the
high point of Samoan weaving virtuosity. Woven of
the finest quality of pandanus which has been soaked
and baked and scraped to a golden whiteness and paper-
like thinness, of strands a sixteenth of an inch in width,
these mats take a year or two years to weave and are
as soft and pliable as linen. They form the unit of
value, and must always be included in the dowry of
the bride. Girls seldom finish a fine mat until they
are nineteen or twenty, but the mat has been started,
and, wrapped up in a coarser one, it rests among the
rafters, a testimony to the girPs industry and manual
skill. She learns the rudiments of bark cloth making j
she can select and cut the paper mulberry wands, peel
off the bark, beat it after it has been scraped by more
expert hands. The patterning of the cloth with a pat-

[32]

i

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

tern board or by free hand drawing is left for the more
experienced adult.
. Throughout this more or less systematic period of
education, the girls maintain a very nice balance be-
tween a reputation for the necessary minimum of
knowledge and a virtuosity which would make too .
heavy demands. A girl's chances of marriage are '^^yyj.^
badly damaged if it gets about the village that she is ^
lazy and inept in domestic tasks. But after these first
stages have been completed the girl marks time tech-
nically for three or four years. She does the routine
weaving, especially of the Venetian blinds and carrying
baskets. She helps with the plantation work and the
cooking, she weaves a very little on her fine mat. But
she thrusts virtuosity away from her as she thrusts
away every other sort of responsibility with the in- ,
variable comment, "Laititi a'u" ("I am but young").
All of her interest is expended on clandestine sex ad- .^
ventures, and she is content to do routine tasks as, to a
certain extent, her brother is also.

But the seventeen-year-old boy is not left passively
to his own devices. , He has learned the rudiments of
fishing, he can take a dug-out canoe over the reef
safely, or manage the stern paddle in a bonito boat.
He can plant taro or transplant cocoanut, husk cocoa-
nuts on a stake and cut the meat out with one deft
quick turn of the knife. Now at seventeen or eighteen
he is thrust into the Aumaga, the society of the young

[33]

/

V

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

men and the older men without titles, the group that
is called, not in euphuism but in sober fact, "the
strength of the village." Here he is badgered into
efficiency by rivalry, precept and example. The older
chiefs who supervise the activities of the Aumaga gaze
equally sternly upon any backslidings and upon any
undue precocity. The prestige of his group is ever
being called into account by the Aumaga of the neigh-
bouring villages. His fellows ridicule and persecute
the boy who fails to appear when any group activity is
on foot, whether work for the village on the planta-
tions, or fishing, or cooking for the chiefs, or play in
the form of a ceremonial call upon some visiting
maiden. Furthermore, the youth is given much more
stimulus to learn and also a greater variety of occupa-
tions are open to him. There is no specialisation among
women, except in medicine and mid-wifery, both the
prerogatives of very old women who teach their arts
to their middle-aged daughters and nieces. The only
other vocation is that of the wife of an official orator/
and no girl will prepare herself for this one type of
marriage which demands special knowledge, for she
has no guarantee that she will marry a man of this
class.

For the boy it is different. He hopes that some day
he will hold a matal name, a name which will make
him a member of the FonOy the assembly of headmen,
which will give him a right to drink kava with chiefs,
to work with chiefs rather than with the young men,

[34]

/

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

to sit inside the house, even though his new title is
only of "between the posts" rank, and not of enough
importance to give him a right to a post for his back.
But very seldom is he absolutely assured of getting
such a name. Each family hold several of these titles
which they confer upon the most promising youths in
the whole family connection. He has many rivals.
They also are in the Aumaga. He must always pit
himself against them in the group activities. There
are also several types of activities in one of which he
must specialise. He must become a house-builder, a
fisherman, an orator or a wood carver. Proficiency in
some technique must set him off a little from his fel-
lows. * Fishing prowess means immediate rewards in
the shape of food gifts to offer to his sweetheart; with-
out such gifts his advances will be scorned. Skill in
house-building means wealth and status, for a young
man who is a skilled carpenter must be treated as cour-
teously as a chief and addressed with the chief's lan-
guage, the elaborate set of honorific words used to
people of rank. And with this goes the continual de- ■
mand that he should not be too efficient, too outstand-
ing, too precocious. He must never excel his fellows^
by more than a little. He must neither arouse their
hatred nor the disapproval of his elders who are far
readier to encourage and excuse the laggard than to
condone precocity. And at the same time he shares his
sister's reluctance to accept responsibility, and if he
should excel gently, not too obviously, he has good

[35]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

chances of being made a chief. If he is sufficiently
talented, the Fono itself may deliberate, search out a
Vacant title to confer upon him and call him in that
he may sit with the old men and learn wisdom. And
yet so well recognised is the unwillingness of the young
men to respond to this honour, that the provision is
always made, "And if the young man runs away, then
never shall he be made a chief, but always he must sit
outside the house with the young men, preparing and
serving the food of the matais with whom he may
not sit in the FonoJ*' Still more pertinent are the
chances of his relationship group bestowing a matai
name upon the gifted young man. And a matai he
wishes to be, some day, some far-off day when his
limbs have lost a little of their suppleness and his heart
the love of fun and of dancing. As one chief of
twenty-seven told me: "I have been a chief only four
years and look, my hair is grey, although in Samoa grey
hair comes very slowly, not in youth, as it comes to
the white man. But always, I must act as if I were
old. I must walk gravely and with a measured step.
I may not dance except upon most solemn occasions,
neither may I play games with the young men. Old
men of sixty are my companions and watch my every
word, lest I make a mistake. Thirty-one people live
in my household. For them I must plan, I must find
them food and clothing, settle their disputes, arrange
their marriages. There is no one in my whole family
who dares to scold me or even to address me familiarly

[36]

THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD

by my first name. It is hard to be so young and yet
to be a chief." And the old men shake their heads
and agree that it is unseemly for one to be a chief so
young.

■ The operation of natural ambition is further vitiated
by the fact that the young man who is made a matai
will not be the greatest among his former associates,
but the youngest and greenest member of the Fono.
And no longer may he associate familiarly with his old
companions J a matai must associate only with maiais,)
must work beside them in the bush and sit and tall
quietly with them in the evening.

And so the boy is faced by a far more difficult di-
lemma than the girl. He dislikes responsibility, but
he wishes to excel in his group j skill will hasten the
day when he is made a chief, yet he receives censure
and ridicule if he slackens his efforts; but he will be
scolded if he proceeds too rapidly; yet if he would
win a sweetheart, he must have prestige among hiS;
fellows. And conversely, his social prestige is in-
creased by his amorous exploits. v^
^J So while the girl rests upon her "pass" proficiency, \ ^
the boy is spurred to greater efforts. A boy is shy of /
a girl who does not have these proofs of efficiency and
is known to be stupid and unskilled; he is afraid he
may come to want to marry her. Marrying a girl with-
out proficiency would be a most imprudent step and
involve an endless amount of wrangling with his fam-
ily. So the girl who is notoriously inept must take her

[37]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

lovers from among the casual, the jaded, and the mar-
ried who are no longer afraid that their senses will be-
trp,y them into an imprudent marriage.
C But the seventeen-year-old girl does not wish to
niarry — not yet. It is better to live as a girl with no
b. responsibility, and a rich variety of emotional experi-
ence. This is the best period of her lifeJ There are
as many beneath her whom she may bully as there are
others above her to tyrannise over her. What she loses
in prestige, she gains in freedom. She has very little
baby-tending to do. Her eyes do not ache from weav-
ing nor does her back break from bending all day over
the tapa board. The long expeditions after fish and
food and weaving materials give ample opportunities
for rendezvous. Proficiency would mean more work, •
more confining work, and earlier marriage, and mar-

y riage is the inevitable to be deferred as long as possible. .

J

[38]

IV

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

A SAMOAN yillage is-made up of some thirty to forty
households, each of which is presided over by a head-
man called a ly^ai- These headmen hold either
chiefly titles or the titles of talking chiefs, who are
the official orators, spokesmen and ambassadors of
chiefs. In a formal village assembly each f?i'atai has
his place, and represents and is responsible for all the
members of his household. These households include
all the individuals who live for any length of time
under the authority and protection of a common
Tnatai. Their composition varies from the biological
family consisting of parents and children only, to
households of fifteen and twenty people who are all
related to the matai or to his wife by blood, marriage
or adoption, but who often have no close relationship
to each other. The adopted members of a household
are usually but not necessarily distant relatives.

Widows and widowers, especially when they are
childless, usually return to their blood relatives, but a
married couple may live with the relatives of either one.
Such a household is not necessarily a close residential
unit, but may be scattered over the village in three or

[39]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

four houses. No one living permanently in another
village is counted as a member of the household, which
is strictly a local unit. Economically, the household is
also a unit, for all work upon the plantations under the
supervision of the mata± who jn turn parcels out to
them food and other necessities.

Within the household,, age rather than relationship
gives disciplinary authority. The matai exercises nomi-
nal and usually real authority over every individual
under his protection, even over his father and mother,*
This control is, of course, modified by personality dif-
ferences, always carefully tempered,-' however, by a
ceremonious acknowledgment of his position. The
newest baby born into such a household is subject to
every individual in it, and his position improves no
whit with age until a younger child appears upon the
scene. But in most households the position of youngest
is a highly temporary one. Nieces and nephews or
destitute young cousins come to swell the ranks of the
household and at adolescence a girl stands virtually in
the middle v/ith as many individuals who must obey
her as there are persons to whom she owes obedience.
Where increased efficiency and increased self-conscious-
ness would perhaps have made her obstreperous and
restless in a differently organised family, here she has
ample outlet for a growing sense of authority.

This development is perfectly regular. A girPs
marriage makes a minimum, of difference in this re-
spect, except in so far as her own children increase

[40]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

most pertinently the supply of agreeably docile subor-
dinates. But the girls who remain unmarried even be-
yond their early twenties are in nowise less highly re-
garded or less responsible than their married sisters.
This tendency to make the classifying principle age,
rather than married state, is reinforced outside the home
by the fact that the wives of untitled men and all un-
married girls past puberty are classed together in the
ceremonial organisation of the village.

Relatives in other households also play a role in the
children's lives. ..Any older relative has a right to de-
mand personal service from younger relatives, a right to
criticise their conduct and to interfere in their affairs.
Thus a little girl may escape alone down to the beach
to bathe only to be met by an older cousin who sets
her washing or caring for a baby or to fetch some
cocoanut to scrub the clothes. ' So closely is the dail^
life bound up with this universal servitude and so nu-
merous are the acknowledged relationships in the name
of which service can be exacted, that for the children
an hour's escape from surveillance is almost impossible.^

This loose but demanding relationship group has its
compensations also. Within it a child of three can
wander safely and come to no harm, can be sure of
finding food and drink, a sheet to wrap herself up in
for a nap, a kind hand to dry casual tears and bind up
her wounds. Any small children who are missing
when night falls, are simply "sought among their kins-
folk," and a baby whose mother has gone inland to

[41]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

work on the plantation is passed from hand to hand
for the length of the village.

\ The ranking by age is disturbed in only a few cases.
fin each village one or two high chiefs have the heredi-
tary right to name some girl of their household as its
taufOy the ceremonial princess of the house. The girl
who at fifteen or sixteen is made a taufo is snatched
from her age group and sometimes from her immedi-
ate family also and surrounded by a glare of prestige]
The older women of the village accord her courtesy
titles, her immediate family often exploits her posi-
tion for their personal ends and in return show great
consideration for her wishes. But as there are only
two or three tau-pos in a village, their unique position
serves to emphasise rather than to disprove the gen-
eral status of young girls.

Coupled with this enormous diffusion of authority
goes a fear of overstraining the relationship bond,
which expresses itself in an added respect for person-
ality. The very number of her captors is the girPs
protection, for does one press her too far, she has but
to change her residence to the home of some more
complacent relative. It is possible to classify the dif-
ferent households open to her as those with hardest
work, least chaperonage, least scolding, largest or least
number of contemporaries, fewest babies, best food,
etc. Few children live continuously in one household,
but are always testing out other possible residences.
And this can be done under the guise of visits and with

[42]

JHE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

no suggestion of truancy. But the minute that the
mildest annoyance grows up at home, the possibility of
flight moderates the discipline and alleviates the child's
sense of dependency. No Samoan child, except the
tawpOy or the thoroughly delinquent, ever has to deal
with a feeling of being trapped. There are always
relatives- to whom one can flee. This is the invariable
answer which a Samoan gives when some familial im-
passe is laid before him. "But she will go to some
other relative." And theoretically the supply of rela-
tives is inexhaustible. Unless the vagrant has com-
mitted some very serious offence like incest, it is only
necessary formally to depart from the bosom of one's
household. A girl whose father has beaten her over
severely in the morning will be found living in haughty
sanctuary, two hundred feet away, in a different house-
hold. So cherished is this system of consanguineous
refuge, that an untitled man or a man of lesser rank
wuITeard the nobler relative who comes to demand a
runaway child. With great politeness and endless ex-
pressions of conciliation, he will beg his noble chief to
return to his noble home and remain there quietly until
his noble anger is healed against his noble child.

The most important relationships * within a Samoan -c^
household which influence the lives of the young peo-
ple are the relationships between the boys and girls
who call each other "brother" and "sister," whether
by blood, marriage or adoption, and the relationship
betweer younger and older relatives. The stress upon

* See / ppendix, page 249.

[43]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

the sex difference between contemporaries and the em-
phasis on relative age are amply explained by the con-
ditions of family life. Relatives of opposite sex have
a most rigid_ code^o^ etiguettejir^scribed for all their
contacts with each other. After they have reached
years of discretion, nine or ten years of age in this
case, they may not touch each other, sit close together,
eat together, address each other familiarly, or mention
any salacious matter in each other's presence. They
may not remain in any house, except their own, to-
gether, unless half the village is gathered there. They
may not walk together, use each other's possessions,
dance on the same floor, or take part in any of the same
small group activities. This strict ^atvoidance applies to
all individuals of the opposite sex within five years
above or below one's own age with whom one was
reared or to whom one acknowledges relationship by
blood or marriage. The conformance to this brother
and sister taboo begins when the younger of the two
children feels "ashamed" at the elder's touch and con-
tinues until old age when the decrepit, toothless pair
of old siblings may again sit on the same mat and not
feel ashamed.

Teiy the word for younger relative, stresses the other
most emotionally charged relationship. The first ma-
ternal enthusiasm of a girl is never expended upon her
own children but upon some younger relative. And it
is the girls and women who use this term most, con-
tinuing to cherish it after they and the younger ones

[44]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

to whom It is applied are full grown. The younger
child in turn expends its enthusiasm upon a still
younger one without manifesting any excessive affec-
tion for the fostering elders.

The word aiga is used roughly to cover all relation-
ships by blood, marriage and adoption, :ind the emo-
tional tone seems to be the same in each case. Rela-
tionship by marriage is counted only as long as an
actual marri.ige connects two kinship groups. If the
marriage is broken in any way, by desertion, divorce,
or death, the relationship is dissolved and members of
the two families are free to marry each other. If the
marriage left any children, a reciprocal relationship
exists between the two households as long as the child
lives, for the mother's family will always have to con-
tribute one kind of property, the father's family an-
other, for occasions when property must be given away
in the name of the child.

A relative is regarded as some one upon whom one
has a multitude of claims and to whom one owes a mul- ^
titude of obligations. From a relative one may demand
food, clothing, and shelter, or assistance in a feud. Re-
fusal of such a demand brands one as stingy and lack-
ing in human kindness, the virtue most esteemed among ^
_the Samoans. No definite repayment Is made at the
time such services are given, except In the case of the
distribution of food to all those who share In a family
enterprise. But careful count of the value of the prop- /
erty given and of the service rendered Is kept and a

[45]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

return gift demanded at the earliest opportunity.
Nevertheless, in native theory the two acts are sepa-
rate, each one in turn becoming a "beggar," a pen-
sioner upon another's bounty. In olden times, the beg-
gar sometimes wore a special girdle which delicately
hinted at the cause of his visit. One old chief gave
\/ me a graphic descriptioivpf the ^behaviour of some one
who had come to ask a favour of a relative. "He will
come early in the morning and enter quietly, sitting
down in the very back of the house, in the place of
least honour. You will say to him, ^So you have come,
be welcome!' and he will answer, *I have come indeed,
saving your noble presence.' Then you will say, ^Are
you thirsty? Alas for your coming, there is little that
is good within the house.' And he will answer, *Let
■ it rest, thank you, for indeed I am not hungry nor
would I drink.' And he will sit and you will sit all
day long and no mention is made of the purpose of
his coming. All day he will sit and brush the ashes
out of the hearth, performing this menial and dirty
task with very great care and attention. If some one
must go inland to the plantation to fetch food, he is
the first to offer to go. If some one must go fishing
to fill out the crew of a canoe, surely he is delighted
to go, even though the sun is hot and his journey
hither has been long. And all day you sit and won-
der, *What can it be that he has come for? Is it that
largest pig that he wants, of has he heard perhaps that
my daughter has just finished a large and beautiful

[46]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

piece of tapa? Would it perhaps be well to send that
tapa, as I had perhaps planned, as a present to my talk-
ing chief, to send it now, so that I may refuse him with
all good faith?' And he sits and studies your counte-
nance and wonders if you will be favourable to his re-
quest. He plays with the children but refuses the neck-
lace of flowers which they have woven for him and
gives it instead to your daughter. Finally night comes.
It is time to sleep and still he has not spoken. So
finally you say to him, *Lo, I would sleep. Will you
sleep also or will you be returning whence you have
come?' And only then will he speak and tell you the
desire in his heart."

So the intrigue, the needs, the obligations of the^
larger relationship group which threads its carefully
remembered way in and out of many houses and many "^
villages, cuts across the life of the household. One
day it is the wife's relatives who come to spend a
month or borrow a fine mat j the next day it is the hus-
band's j the third, a niece who is a valued worker in
the household may be called home by the illness of
her father. Very seldom do all of even the small chil-^n
dren of a biological family live in one household and jT
while the claims of the household are paramount, in
the routine of everyday life, illness or need on the part
of the closer relative in another household will call the
wanderers home again.

Obligations either to give general assistance or to
give specific traditionally required service, as in a mar-

[47]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

riage or at a birth, follow relationship lines, not house-
hold lines. But a marriage of many years' duration
binds the relationship groups of husband and wife so
closely together that to all appearances it is the house-
hold unit which gives aid and accede^ to a request
brought by the relative of either one. \Only in fami-
lies of high rank where the distaff side has priority
in decisions and in furnishing the tau-pOy the princess
of the house, and the male line priority in holding the
title, does the actual blood relationship continue to be
a matter of great practical importance j and this impor-
tance is lost in the looser household group constituted
as it is by the three principles of blood, marriage and
adoption, and bound together by common ties of every-
^ day living and mutual economic dependence, j

The matai of a household is theoretically exempt
from the performance of small domestic tasks, but he
is seldom actually so except in the case of a chief of
high rank. However, the leading role is always ac-
corded to him in any industrial pursuit j he dresses the
/ pig for the feasts and cuts up the cocoanuts which the
^, boys and women have gathered. The family cooking
is done by the men and women both, but the bulk of
the work falls upon the boys and young men. The old
men spin the cocoanut fibre, and braid it into the native
cord which is used for fish lines, fish nets, to sew canoe
parts together and to bind all the different parts of a
house in place. With the old women who do the bulk
of the weaving and making of bark cloth, they super-

[48]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

vise the younger children who remain at home. The
heavy routine agricultural work falls upon the women
who are responsible for the weeding, transplanting,
gathering and transportation of the food, and the gath-
ering of the paper mulberry wands from which bark
will be peeled for making tapa, of the hibiscus bark
and pandanus leaves for weaving mats. The older
girls and women also do the routine reef fishing for
octopuses, sea eggs, jelly fish, crabs, and other small
fry. The younger girls carry the water, care for the
lamps (to-day except in times of great scarcity when
the candle nut and cocoanut oil are resorted to, the na-
tives use kerosene lamps and lanterns), and sweep and
arrange the houses. Tasks are all graduated with a
fair recognition of abilities which differ with age, and
except in the case of individuals of very high rank, a
task is rejected because a younger person has skill
enough to perform it, rather than because it is beneath
an adult's dignity.

Rank in the village and rank In the household reflect
each other, but village rank hardly affects the young
children. If a girl's father is a mataiy the matai of the
household in which she lives, she has no appeal from
his authority. But if some other member of the family
is the mataiy he and his wife may protect her from her
father's exactions. In the first case, disagreement with
her father means leaving the household and going to
live with other relatives j in the second case it may
mean only a little internal friction. Also in the family

[49]

?

^ COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

of a nigh chief or a high talking chief there is more
emphasis upon ceremonial, more emphasis upon hospi-
tality. The children are better bred and also much
harder worked. But aside from the general quality of
a household which is dependent upon the rank of its
head, households of very different rank may seem very
similar to young children. They are usually more con-
cerned with the temperament of those in authority than
with their rank. An uncle in another village who is
a very high chief is of much less significance in a child's
life than some old woman in her own household who
has a frightful temper.
-^ Nevertheless, rank not of birth but of title is very
important in Samoa. The status of a village depends
upon the rank of its high chief, the prestige of a house-
hold depends upon the title of its matai. Titles are of
two grades, chiefs and talking chiefs| each title carries
many other duties and prerogatives besides the head-
ship of a household. And the Samoans find rank a
never-failing source of interest. (Xhey have invented
an elaborate courtesy language which must be used to
people of rank J complicated etiquette surrounds each
rank in society. Something which concerns their elders
so nearly cannot help being indirectlv reflected in the
lives of some of the children. This is particularly true
of the relationship of children to each other in house-
holds which hold titles to which some of them will one
day attain. How these far-away issues of adult life
effect the lives of children and young people can best

[50]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

be understood by following their influence in the lives
of particular children.

In the household of a high chief named Malae lived
two little girls, Meta, twelve, and Timu, eleven. Meta
was a self-possessed, efficient little girl. Malae had
taken her from her mother's house — her mother was
his cousin — because she showed unusual intelligence and
precocity. Timu, on the other hand, was an abnor-
mally shy, backward child, below her age group in in-
telligence. But Meta's mother was only a distant
cousin of Malae. Had she not married into a strange
village where Malae was living temporarily, Meta
might never have come actively to the notice of her
noble relative. And Timu was the only daughter of
Malae's dead sister. Her father had been a quarter
caste which served to mark her off and increase her
self-consciousness. Dancing was an agony to her. She
fled precipitately from an elder's admonitory voice.
But Timu would be Malae's next taupo, princess. She
was pretty, the principal recognised qualification, and
she came from the distafF side of the house, the pre-
ferred descent for a tatc-po. So Meta, the more able
in every way, was pushed to the wall, and Timu, mis-
erable over the amount of attention she received, was
dragged forward. The mere presence of another more
able and enterprising child would probably have em-
phasised Timu's feeling of inferiority, but this pub-
licity stressed it painfully. Commanded to dance on
every occasion, she would pause whenever she caught

[51]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

an onlooker's eye and stand a moment wringing her
hands before going on with the dance.

In another household, this same title of Malae's
taupo played a different role. This was in the house-
hold of Malae's paternal aunt who lived with her hus-
band in Malae's guest house in his native village. Her
eldest daughter, Pana, held the title of tawpo of the
house of Malae. But Pana was twenty-six, though still
unmarried. She must be wedded soon and then an-
other girl must be found to hold the title. Timu
would still be too young. Pana had three younger sis-
ters who by birth were supremely eligible to the title.
But Mele, the eldest of twenty, was lame, and Pepe
of fourteen was blind in one eye and an incorrigible
tomboy. The youngest was even younger than Timu.
So all three were effectually barred from succession.
This fact reacted favourably upon the position of Filita.
She was a seventeen-year-old niece of the father of the
other children with no possible claims on a title in the
house of Malae, but she had lived with her cousins
since childhood. Filita was pretty, efficient, adequate,
neither lame like Mele nor blind and hoydenish like
Pepe. True she could never hope to be taufo, but
neither could they, despite their superior birth, so
peace and amity reigned because of her cousins' defi-
ciencies. Still another little girl came within the circle
of influence of the title. This was Pula, another little
cousin in a third village. But her more distant rela-
tionship and possible claims were completely obscured

t52j

A chiefs daughter and the bfiby of the household zvhose \elloz
hair will some day make a chiefs headdress

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

by the fact that she was the only granddaughter of the
highest chief in her own village and her becoming the
tawpo of that title was inevitable so that her life was
untouched by any other possibility. Thus six girls in
addition to the present taufOy were influenced for good
or evil by the possibility of succession to the title. But
as there are seldom more than one or two taupos in a
village, these influences are still fairly circumscribed
when compared with the part which rank plays in the
lives of boys, for there are usually one or more matai
names in every relationship group.

Rivalry plays a much stronger part here. In the
choice of the taufo and the mana'ia (the titular heir-
apparent) there is a strong prejudice in favour of
blood relationship and also for the choice of the tawpo
from the female and the manaia from the male line.
But in the interests of efficiency this scheme had been
modified, so that most titles were filled by the most
able youth from the whole relationship and affinity
group. So it was in Alofi. Tui, a chief of importance
in the village, had one son, an able intelligent boy.
Tui's brothers were dull and inept, no fit successors to
the title. One of them had an ill-favoured young son,
a stupid, unattractive youngster. There were no other
males in the near relationship group. It was assumed
that the exceedingly eligible son would succeed his
father. And then at twenty he died. The little
nephew hardly gave promise of a satisfactory develop-
ment, and so Tui had his choice of looking outside his

[53]

f

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

village or outside of his near relationship group. Vil-
lage feeling runs high in Tui's village. Tui's blood
relatives lived many villages away. They were stran-
gers. If he did not go to them and search for a prom-
ising youth whom he could train as his successor, he
must either find an eligible young husband for his
daughter or look among his wife's people. Provision-
ally he took this last course, and his wife's brother's son
came to live in his household. In a year, his new
father promised the boy, he might assume his dead
cousin's name if he showed himself worthy.

In the family of high chief Fua a very different
problem presented itself. His was the highest title in
the village. He was over sixty and the question of
succession was a moot one. The boys in his household
consisted of Tata, his eldest son who was illegitimate,
Molo and Nua, the sons of his widowed sister, Sisi, his
son by his first legal wife (since divorced and re-
married on another island), and Tuai, the husband of
his niece, the sister of Molo and Nua. And in the
house of Fua's eldest brother lived his brother's daugh-
ter's son, Alo, a youth of great promise. Here then
were enough claimants to produce a lively rivalry.
Tuai was the oldest, calm, able, but not sufiiciently
hopeful to be influenced in his conduct except as it
made him more ready to assert the claims of superior
age over his wife's younger brothers whose claims were
better than his. Next in age came Tata, the sour,
beetle-browed bastard, whose chances were negligible

[54]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

as long as there were those of legitimate birth to dis-
pute his left-handed claims. But Tata did not lose
hope. Cautious, tortuous-minded, he watched and
waited. He was in love with Lotu, the daughter of a
talking chief of only medium rank. For one of Fua's
sons, Lotu would have been a good match. But as
Fua's bastard who wished to be chief, he must marry
high or not at all. The two nephews, Molo and Nua,
played different hands. Nua, the younger, went away f'^^'T".'
to seek his fortune as a native marine at the Naval Sta- \^.(c ^_
tion. This meant a regular income, some knowledge
of English, prestige of a sort. Molo, the elder brother,
stayed at home and made himself indispensable. He
was the tamafafine, the child of the distaff side, and it u^
was his role to take his position for granted, the ta?na-
jafine of the house of Fua, what more could any one
ask in the way of immediate prestige. As for the fu-
ture — his manner was perfect. All of these young
men, and likewise Alo, the great nephew, were mem-
bers of the Aumaga, grown up and ready to assume
adult responsibilities. Sisi, the sixteen-year-old legiti-
mate son, was still a boy, slender, diffident, presuming
far less upon his position as son and heir-apparent than
did his cousin. He was an attractive, intelligent boy.
If his father lived until Sisi was twenty-five or thirty,
his succession seemed inevitable. Even should his
father die sooner, the title might have been held for
him. But in this latter possibility there was one
danger. Samala, his father's older brother, would

[55]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

have a strong voice in the choice of a successor to the
title. And Alo was Samala's adored grandson, the
son of his favourite daughter. Alo was the model
of all that a young man should be. He eschewed the
company of women, stayed much at home and rigor-
ously trained his younger brother and sister. While
the other young men played cricket, he sat at Samala's
feet and memorised genealogies. He never forgot
that he was the son of Safua, the house of Fua. More
able than Molo, his claim to the title was practically
as good, although within the family group Molo as
the child of the distaff side would always outvote him.
So Alo was Sisi's most dangerous rival, provided his
father died soon. And should Fua live twenty years
longer, another complication threatened his succession.
Fua had but recently re-married, a woman of very high
rank and great wealth who had a five-year-old illegiti-
mate son, Nifo. Thinking always of this child, for she
and Fua had no children, she did all that she could to
undermine Sisi's position as heir-apparent and there was
every chance that as her ascendency over Fua increased
with his advancing age, she might have Nifo named as
his successor. His illegitimacy and lack of blood tie
would be offset by the fact that he was child of the dis-
taff side in the noblest family in the island and would
inherit great wealth from his mother.

Of a different character was the problem which con-
fronted Sila, the stepdaughter of Ono, a matal of low
rank. She was the eldest in a family of seven children.

[56]

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

Ono was an old man, decrepit and ineffective. Lefu,
Sila's mother and his second wife, was worn out, weary
from bearing eleven children. The only adult males
in the household were Laisa, Ono's brother, an old man
like himself, and Laisa's idle shiftless son, a man of
thirty, whose only interest in life was love affairs. He
was unmarried and shied away from this responsibility
as from all others. The sister next younger than Sila
was sixteen. She had left home and lived, now here,
now there, among her relatives. Sila was twenty-two.
She had been married at sixteen and against her will
to a man much older than herself who had beaten her
for her childish ways. After two years of married life,
she had run away from her husband and gone home to
live with her parents, bringing her little two-year-old
boy, who was now five years old, with her. At twenty
she had had a love affair with a boy of her own village,
and borne a daughter who had lived only a few months.
After her baby died her lover had deserted her. Sila
disliked matrimony. She was conscientious, sharp-
tongued, industrious. She worked tirelessly for her
child and her small brothers and sisters. She did not
want to marry again. But there were three old people
and six children in her household with only herself and
her idle cousin to provide for them. And so she said ,
despondently: "I think I will get married to that boy."
"Which boy, Sila?" I asked. "The father of my baby
who is dead." "But I thought you said you did not
want him for a husband?" "No more do I. But I

[57]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

must find some one to care for my family." And in-
deed there was no other way. Her stepfather's title
was a very low one. There were no young men within
the family to succeed to it. Her lover was industrious
and of even lower degree. The bait of the title would
secure a worker for the family.

f"^ And so within many households the shadow of nor
bility falls upon the children, sometimes lightly, some-
>/ 1 times heavily, often long before they are old enough
\ to understand the meaning of these intrusions from
I the adult world.

[58]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

UNTIL a child is six or seven at least she associates
very little with her contemporaries. Brothers and sis-
ters and small cousins who live in the same household,
of course, frolic and play together, but outside the
household each child clings closely to its older guardian
and only comes in contact with other children in case
the little nursemaids are friends. But at about seven
years of age, the children begin to form larger groups,
a kind of voluntary association which never exists in
later life, that is, a group recruited from both relation-
ship and neighbourhood groups. These are strictly
divided along sex lines and antagonism between the
small girls and the small boys is one of the salient fea- '
tures of the group life. The little girls are just begin- V
ning to "be ashamed" in the presence of older brothers, *^
and the prohibition that one small girl must never join
a group of boys is beginning to be enforced. The fact
that the(boys are less burdened and so can range fur-
ther afield in search of adventure, while the girls have ^
to carry their heavy little charges with them, also makes
a difference between the sexes. ^ The groups of small
children which hang about the fringes of some adult

[59]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

activity often contain both girls and boys, but here the
association principle is simply age discrimination on the
part of their elders, rather than voluntary association
on the children's part.

These age gangs are usually confined to the children
who live in eight or ten contiguous households.* They
are flexible chance associations, the members of which
manifest a vivid hostility towards their contemporaries
in neighbouring villages and sometimes towards other
gangs within their own village. Blood ties cut across
these neighbourhood alignments so that a child may be
on good terms with members of two or three different
groups. A strange child from another group, provided
she came alone, could usually take refuge beside a rela-
tive. But the little girls of Siufaga looked askance at
the little girls of Luma, the nearest village and both
lool^d with even greater suspicion at the little girls
from Faleasao, who lived twenty minutes' walk away.
However, heart burnings over these divisions were very
temporary affairs. When Tua's brother was ill, her
entire family moved from the far end of Siufaga into
the heart of Luma. For a few days Tua hung rather
dolefully about the house, only to be taken in within
a week by the central Luma children with complete
amiability. But when she returned some weeks later
J ': to Siufaga, she became again "a Siufaga girl," object
elect of institutionalised scorn and gibes to her recent
companions.

*See Neighbourhood Maps. Appendix I, page 251.

[60]

r

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

No_very intense friendships are made at this age."^ J^
The relationship and neighbourhood structure of the (^
group overshadows the personalities within it. Also \/
the most intense affection is always reserved for near
relatives and pairs of little sisters take the place of
chums. The Western comment, "Yes, Mary and Julia
are such good friends as well as sisters!" becomes in
Samoa, "But she is a relative," if a friendship is com-
mented upon. The older ones fend for the younger,
give them their spoils, weave them flower necklaces and
give them their most treasured shells. This relation-
ship aspect is the only permanent element in the group
and even this is threatened by any change of residence.
The emotional tone attached to the inhabitants of a
strange village tends to make even a well-known cousin
seem a little strange.

Of the different groups of little girls there was only
one which shov/ed characteristics which would make it
possible to classify it as a gang. An accident of resi-
dence accounts for the most intense group development
being in the centre of Luma, where nine little girls of
nearly the same age and with abundant relationship ties
lived close together. The development of a group '^ .
which played continually together and maintained a
fairly coherent hostility towards outsiders, seems to be I
more of a function of residence than of the personality
of any child particularly endowed with powers of lead-
ership. The nine little girls in this group were less
shy, less suspicious, more generous towards one another,

[61]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

more socially enterprising than other children of the
same age and in general reflected the socialising effects
of group life. Outside this group, the children of this
age had to rely much more upon their immediate re-
lationship group reinforced perhaps by the addition of
one or two neighbours. Where the personality of a
child stood out it was more because of exceptional home
environment than a result of social give-and-take with
children of her own age.

Children of this age had no group activities ex-
/ J cept play, in direct antithesis to the home life where

' the child's only^ function was work — ^baby-tending and
the performance of numerous trivial tasks and innu-
merable errands. They foregathered in the early eve-
ning, before the late Samoan supper, and occasionally
during the general siesta hour in the afternoon. On
moonlight nights they scoured the villages alternately
attacking or fleeing from the gangs of small boys, peek-
ing through drawn shutters, catching land crabs, am-
bushing wandering lovers, or sneaking up to watch a
birth or a miscarriage in some distant house. Possessed
by a fear of the chiefs, a fear of small boys, a fear
of their relatives and by a fear of ghosts, no gang of
less than four or five dared to venture forth on these
nocturnal excursions. They were veritable groups of
little outlaws escaping from the exactions of routine

/tasks. Because of the strong feeling for relationship

j/ //and locality, the part played by stolen time, the need

|/ for immediately executed group plans, and the punish-

[62]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

ment which hung over the heads of children who got
too far out of earshot, the Samoan child was as de-
pendent upon the populousness of her immediate lo-^-
cality, as is the child in a rural community in the West,
True her isolation here was never one-eighth of a mile
in extent, but glaring sun and burning sands, coupled
with the number of relatives to be escaped from in the
day or the number of ghosts to be escaped from at night,
magnified this distance until as a barrier to companion-
ship it was equivalent to three or four miles in rural
America. Thus there occurred the phenomenon of the
iso lated child in a village full of children of her own
age. Such was Luna, aged ten, who lived in one of the
^'scattered houses belonging to a high chief's household.
This house was situated at the very end of the village
where she lived with her grandmother, her mother's
sister Sami, Sami's husband and baby, and two younger
maternal aunts, aged seventeen and fifteen. Luna's
mother was dead. Her other brothers and sisters lived
on another island with her father's people. She was
ten, but young for 'her age, a quiet, listless child, re-
luctant to take the initiative, the sort of child who
would always need an institutionalised group life. Her
only relatives close by were two girls of fourteen,
whose long legs and absorption in semi-adult tasks
made them far too grown-up companions for her.
Some little girls of fourteen might have tolerated
Luna about, but not Selu, the younger of the cousins,
whose fine mat was already three feet under way. In

[63]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

the next house, a stone's throw away, lived two little
girls, Pimi and Vana, aged eight and ten. But they
were not relatives and being chief baby-tenders to four
younger children, they had no time for exploring.
There were no common relatives to bring them to-
gether and so Luna lived a solitary life, except when
an enterprising young aunt of eleven came home to
her mother's house. This aunt, Siva, was a fascinat-
ing companion, a vivid and precocious child, whom
Luna followed about in open-mouthed astonishment.
But Siva had proved too much of a handful for her
widowed mother, and the mataly her uncle, had taken
her to live in his immediate household at the other
end of the village, on the other side of the central
Luma gang. They formed far more attractive com-
panions and Siva seldom got as far as her mother's
house in her occasional moments of freedom. So un-
enterprising Luna cared for her little cousin, followed
her aunt and grandmother about and most of the time
presented a very forlorn appearance.

In strong contrast was the fate of Lusi, who was only
seven, too young to be really eligible for the games of
her ten- and eleven-year-old elders. Had she lived in
an isolated spot, she would have been merely a neigh-
bourhood baby. But her house was in a strategic posi-
tion, next door to that of her cousins, Maliu and Pola,
important members of the Luma gang. Maliu, one of
the oldest members of the group, had a tremendous
feeling for all her young relatives, and Lusi was her

[64]

r /
THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

first cousin. So tiny, immature Lusi had the full
benefit of a group life denied to Luna.

At the extreme end of Siufaga lived Vina, a gentle,
unassuming girl of fourteen. Her father's house stood
all alone in the centre of a grove of palm trees, just
out of sight and ear-shot of the nearest neighbour.
Her only companions were her first cousin, a reserved
capable eighteen-year-old and two cousins of seventeen
and nineteen. There was one little cousin of twelve
also in the neighbourhood, but five younger brothers
and sisters kept her busy. Vina also had several broth-
ers and sisters younger than herself, but they were old
enough to fend for themselves and Vina was compara-
tively free to follow the older girls on fishing expedi-
tions. So she never escaped from being the little girl,
tagging after older ones, carrying their loads and run-
ning their errands. She was a flurried anxious child,
overconcerned with pleasing others, docile in her
chance encounters with contemporaries from long habit
of docility. A free give-and-take relationship within
her own age group had been denied to her and was now
denied to her forever. For it was only to the eight-
to twelve-year-old girl that this casual group associa- •'
tion was possible. As puberty approached, and a girl
gained physical strength and added skill, her household
absorbed her again. She must make the oven, she must
go to work on the plantation, she must fish. Her days
were filled with long tasks and new responsibilities.

Such a child was Fitu. In September she was one

[65]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

of the dominant members of the gang, a little taller
than the rest, a little lankier, more strident and execu-
tive, but very much a harum-scarum little girl among
little girls, with a great baby always on her hip. But
by April she had turned the baby over to a younger
sister of ninej the still younger baby was entrusted to
a little sister of five and Fitu worked with her mother
on the plantations, or went on long expeditions after
hibiscus bark, or for fish. She took the family washing
to the sea and helped make the oven on cooking days.
Occasionally in the evening she slipped away to play
games on the green with her former companions but
usually she was too tired from the heavy unaccustomed
work, and also a slight strangeness had crept over her.
She felt that her more adult activities set her off from
the rest of the group with whom she had felt so much
at home the fall before. She made only abortive at-
tempts to associate with the older girls in the neigh-
bourhood. Her mother sent her to sleep in the pas-
tor's house next door, but she returned home after
three days. Those girls were all too old, she said.
"Laititi aV ("I am but young"). And yet she was
spoiled for her old group. The three villages num-
bered fourteen such children, just approaching puberty,
preoccupied by unaccustomed tasks and renewed and
closer association with the adults of their families, not
yet interested in boys, and so forming no new alliances
in accordance with sex Interests. Soberly they perform
their household tasks, select a teacher from the older

[66]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

women of their family, learn to bear the suffix, mean-
ing "little" dropped from the "little girl" which had
formerly described them. But they never again amal-
gamate into such free and easy groups as the before-
the-teens gang. As sixteen- and seventeen-year-old
girls, they will still rely upon relatives, and the picture
is groupings of twos or of threes, never more. The'
neighbourhood feelings drop out and girls of seventeen
will ignore a near neighbour who is an age mate and
go the length of the village to visit a relative. Rela-
tionship and similar sex interests are now the deciding
factor in friendships. Girls also followed passively
the stronger allegiance of the boys. If a girPs sweet-
heart has a chum who is interested in a cousin of hers,
the girls strike up a lively, but temporary, friendship.
Occasionally such friendships even go outside of the
relationship group.

Although girls may confide only in one or two girl
relatives, their sex status is usually sensed by the^jotlier
women of the village and alliances shift and change . ,
on this basis, from the shy adolescent who is suspicious [
of all older girls, to the girl whose first or second love
affair still looms as very important, to the girls who
are beginning to centre all their attention upon one
boy and possibly matrimony. Finally the unmarried ~"
mother selects her friends, when possible, from those
in like case with herself, or from women of ambiguous
marital position, deserted or discredited young wives.

Very few friendships of younger for older girls cut

[67]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

across these groupings after puberty. The twelve-
year-old may have a great affection and admiration for
her sixteen-year-old cousin (although any of these
enthusiasms for older girls are pallid matters com-
pared to a typical school girl "crush" in our civilisa-
tion). But when she is fifteen and her cousin nine-
teen, the picture changes. All of the adult and near-
V adult world is hostile, spying upon her love affairs in
I Its more circumspect sophistication, supremely not to be
trusted. No one is to be trusted who is not immedi-
ately engaged in similarly hazardous adventures.

It may safely be said that without the artificial con-
ditions produced by residence in the native pastor's
household or in the large missionary boarding school,
the girls do not go outside their relationship group to
make friends. (In addition to the large girls' boarding
school which served all of American Samoa, the native
pastor of each community maintained a small informal
boarding school for boys and girls. To these schools
were sent the girls whose fathers wished to send them
later to the large boarding school, and also girls whose
parents wished them to have three or four years of the
superior educational advantages and stricter supervision
of the pastor's home.) Here unrelated girls live side
by side sometimes for years. But as one of the two
defining features of a household is common residence,
the friendships formed between girls who have lived
in the pastor's household are not very different psy-
chologically from the friendship of cousins or girls

[68]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

connected only by affinity who live in the same family.
The only friendships which really are different in kind
from those formed by common residence or member-
ship in the same relationship group, are the institution-
alised relationships between the wives of chiefs and the
wives of talking chiefs. But these friendships can only
be understood in connection with the friendships among
boys and men.

The little boys follow the same pattern as do thes.
I little girls, running in a gang based upon the double ■' ^
"bonds of neighbourhood and relationship. The feel- Y
ing for the ascendency of age is always much stronger j^
than in the case of girls because the older boys do notA
withdraw into their family groups as do the gi^lf(' The
fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys gang together with
the same freedom as do the twelve-year-olds. The bor-
derline between small boys and bigger boys is therefore
a continually shifting one, the boys in an intermediate
position now lording it over the younger boys, now
tagging obsequiously in the wake of their elders.
There are two institutionalised relationships between
boys which are called by the same name and possibly
were at one time one relationship. This is the soay the
companion at circumcision and the ambassador in love y/
afFairs. Boys are circumcised in pairs, making the ar-
rangements themselves and seeking out an older man
who has acquired a reputation for skilfulness. There
seems to be here simply a logical inter-relationship of
cause and effect j a boy chooses a friend (who is usu-

[69]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ally also a relative) as his companion and the experience
shared binds them closer together. There were sev-
eral pairs of boys in the village who had been circum-
cised together and were still inseparable companions,
often sleeping together in the house of one of them.
\ Casual homosexual practices occurred in such relation-

'^ I ships. However, when the friendships of grown boys
of the village were analysed, no close correspondence
with the adolescent allegiance was found and older boys

^ were as often found in groups of three or four as in

y pairs.

^ /" ' When a boy is two or three years past puberty, his

I I choice of a companion is influenced by the convention
■. that a young man seldom speaks for himself in love
' and never in a proposal of marriage. He accordingly
'; needs a friend of about his age whom he can trust to
sing his praises and press his suit with requisite fervour
^\ and discretion. For this office, a relative, or, if the
affair be desperate, several relatives are employed. A
youth is influenced in his choice by his need of an am-
bassador who is not only trustworthy and devoted but
plausible and insinuating as a procurer. This soa re-
lationship is often, but not necessarily, reciprocal. The
expert in love comes in time to dispense with the serv-
ices of an intermediary, wishing to taste to the full the
sweets of all the stages in courtship. At the same time
his services are much in demand by others, if they
entertain any hope at all of his dealing honourably by
his principal.

[70]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

But the boys have also other matters besides love-
making in which they must co-operate. Three are
needed to man a bonito canoe ; two usually go together
to lasso eels on the reef j work on the communal taro
plantations demands the labour of all the youths in the
village. So that while a boy too chooses his best friends
from among his relatives, his sense of social solidarity
is always much stronger than that of a girl. The
Aualuma, the organisation of young girls and wives of
untitled men, is an exceedingly loose association gath-
ered for very occasional communal work, and still more
occasional festivities. In villages where the old intri-
cacies of the social organisation are beginning to fall
into disuse, it is the Aualmita which disappears first,
while the Aumaga, the young men's organisation, has
too important a place in the village economy to be thus
ignored. The Aumaga is indeed the most enduring
social factor in the village. The matais meet more
formally and spend a great deal of time in their own
households, but the young men work together during
the day, feast before and after their labours, are present
as a serving group at all meetings of the matais, and
when the day's work is over, dance and go courting to-
gether in the evening. Many of the young men sleep
in their friends' houses, a privilege but grudgingly
accorded the more chaperoned girls.

Another factor which qualified men's relationships is
the reciprocal relationship between chiefs and talking
chiefs. The holders of these two classes of titles are

[71]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

not necessarily related, although this is often the case
as it is considered an advantage to be related to both
ranks. But the talking chiefs are major domos, assist-
ants, ambassadors, henchmen, and councillors of their
chiefs, and these relationships are often foreshadowed
among the young men, the heirs-apparent or the heirs
aspirant to the family titles.

Among women there are occasional close alliances
between the taufo and the daughter of her father's
principal talking chief. But these friendships always
suffer from their temporary character j the taufo will
inevitably marry into another village. And it is rather
between the wife of the chief and the wife of a talking
chief that the institutionalised and life-long friend-
ship exists. The wife of the talking chief acts as
assistant, advisor, and mouthpiece for the chief's wife
and in turn counts upon the chief's wife for support
^and material help. It is a friendship based upon re-
ciprocal obligations having their origins ia the relation-
ship between the women's husbands, and it is the only
women's friendship which oversteps the limits of
the relationship and affinity group. Such friendships
based on an accident of marriage and enjoined by the
social structure should hardly be classed as voluntary.
And within the relationship group itself, friendship is
so patterned as to be meaningless. I once asked a young
married woman if a neighbour with whom she was
always upon the most uncertain and irritated terms was
a friend of hers. "Why, of course, her mother's father's

[72]

THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP

father, and my father's mother's father were brothers."
Friendship based on temperamental congeniality was
a most tenuous bond, subject to shifts of interest and
to shifts of residence, and a woman came to rely more
and more on the associates to whose society and interest
■blood and marriage entitled her.

Association based upon age as a principle may be said',
to have ceased for the girls before puberty, due to the
exceedingly individual nature of their tasks and th«
need for secrecy in their amatory adventures. In the
case of the boys, greater freedom, a more compelling'
social structure, and continuous participation in co-op-
erative tasks, brings about an age-group associatioii
which lasts through life. This grouping is influenced'
but not determined by relationship, and distorted by
the influence of rank, prospective rank in the case of
youth, equal rank but disproportionate age in the case
of older men.

[73]

VI

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

THE community ignores both boys and girls from
birth until they are fifteen or sixteen years of age.
Children under this age have no social standing, no
recognised group activities, no part in the social life
except when they are conscripted for the informal
dance floor. But at a year or two beyond puberty —
the age varies from village to village so that boys of
sixteen will in one place still be classed as small boys,
in another as taule^ale^asy young men — ^both boys and
girls are grouped into a rough approximation of the
adult groupings, given a name for their organisation,
and are invested with definite obligations and privi-
leges in the community life.

The organisation of young men, the Aumaga,' of
young girls and the wives of untitled men and widows,
the Aualumay and of the wives of titled men, are all
echoes of the central political structure of the village,
the FonOy the organisation of mataisy men who have
the titles of chiefs or of talking chiefs. The Fono is
always conceived as a round house in which each title
has a special position, must be addressed with certain
ceremonial phrases, and given a fixed place in the order
of precedence in the serving of the kava. This ideal
house has certain fixed divisions, in the right sector sit
the high chief and his special assistant chiefs j in the

[74]

THE Gli L IN THE COMMUNITY

front of the house sit the talking chiefs whose business
it is to make the speeches, welcome strangers, accept
gifts, preside over the distribution of food and make all
plans and arrangements for group activities. Against
the posts at the back of the house sit the matah of low
rank, and between the posts and at the centre sit those
of so little importance that no place is reserved for
them. This framework of titles continues from gen-,
eration to generation and holds a fixed place in the
larger ideal structure of the titles of the whole island,
the whole archipelago, the whole of Samoa. With
some of these titles, which are in the gift of certain
families, go certain privileges, a right to a house name,
a right to confer a taufo name, a princess title, upon
some young girl relative and an heir-apparent title, the
manaiaj on some boy of the household. Besides these
prerogatives of the high chiefs, each member of the
two classes of fnalais, chiefs and talking chiefs, has
certain ceremonial rights. A talking chief must be
served his kava with a special gesture, must be ad-
dressed with a separate set of verbs and nouns suitable
to his rank, must be rewarded by the chiefs in tapa or
fine mats for his ceromonially rendered services. The
■ chiefs must be addressed with still another set of nouns
and verbs, must be served with a different and more
honourable gesture in the kava ceremony, must be
furnished with food by their talking chiefs, must be
honoured and escorted by the talking chiefs on every
important occasion. The name of the village, the cere-
monial name of the public square in which great cere-

[75]

COMING OF AGE IN S \MOA

monies are held, the name of the meeting house of the
FonOy the names of the principal chiefs and talking
chiefs, the names of taupo and manaia, of the Aualuma
and the Aumaga, are contained in a set of ceremonial
salutations called the Fa'alupega, or courtesy titles of
a village or district. Visitors on formally entering a
village must recite the Fa'alupega as their initial cour-
tesy to their hosts.

The Aumaga mirrors this organisation of the older
men. Here the young men learn to make speeches, to
conduct themselves with gravity and decorum, to serve
and drink the kava, to plan and execute group enter-
prises. When a boy is old enough to enter the Aumaga y
the head of his household either sends a present of
food to the group, announcing the addition of the boy
to their number, or takes him to a house where they
are meeting and lays down a great kava root as a pres-
ent. Henceforth the boy is a member of a group
which is almost constantly together. Upon them falls
all the heavy work of the village and also the greater
part of the social intercourse between villages which
centres about the young unmarried people. When a
visiting village comes, it is the Aumaga which calls in
a body upon the visiting taufOy taking gifts, dancing
and singing for her benefit.

The organisation of the Aualuma is a less formalised
version of the Aumaga. When a girl is of age, two or
three years past puberty, varying with the village prac-
tice, her fnatai will send an offering of food to the
house of the chief taufo of the village, thus announc-

[76]

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

Ing that he wishes the daughter of his house to be
henceforth counted as one of the group of young girls
who form her court. But while the Aumaga is cen-
tred about the FonOy the young men meeting outside
or in a separate house, but exactly mirroring the forms
and ceremonies of their elders, the ^u a luma is centred
about the person of the tawpOy forming a group of y
maids of honour. They have no organisation as have
the Aumaga y and furthermore, they do hardly any
work. Occasionally the young girls may be called
upon to sew thatch or gather paper mulberry j more
occasionally they plant and cultivate a paper mulberry
crop, but their main function is to be ceremonial help-
ers for the meetings of the wives of mataisy and vil-
lage hostesses in inter-village life. In many parts of
Samoa the Aualuma has fallen entirely to pieces and
is only remembered in the greeting words that fall
from the lips of a stranger. But if the Aumaga should
disappear, Samoan village life would have to be en-
tirely reorganised, for upon the ceremonial and actual
work of the young and untitled men the whole life of "- v-
the village depends.

Although the wives of matais have no organisation
recognised in the Fa'alupaga (courtesy titles), their
association is firmer and more important than that of
the Aualuma. The wives of titled men hold their
own formal meetings, taking their status from their
husbands, sitting at their husbands' posts and drinking
their husbands' kava. The wife of the highest chief
receives highest honour, the wife of the principal talk-

[77]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ing chief makes the most Important speeches. The
women are completely dependent upon their husbands
for their status in this village group. Once a man has
been given a title, he can never go back to the Aumaga.
His title may be taken away from him when he is old,
or if he is inefficient, but a lower title will be given him
that he may sit and drink his kava with his former
associates. But the widow or divorced wife of a matai
must go back into the Aualuma, sit with the young girls
outside the house, serve the food and run the errands,
entering the women's fono only as a servant or an
entertainer. ^,,-^-~~^

The womei-p fonos^^are of two sorts: fonos which
precede or fdllbw-eommunal work, sewing the thatch
for a guest house, bringing the coral rubble for its floor
or weaving fine mats for the dowry of the taupo; and
ceremonial fonos to welcome visitors from another vil-
lage. Each of these meetings was designated by its
purpose, as a falelalagUy a weaving bee, or an 'aiga
fiafia tama'ita'iy ladles' feast. **rhe women are only
recognised socially by the women of a visiting village
but the tau-po andTier court are the centre of the rec-
ognition of both men and women In the malaga, the
travelTing. party. And these wives of high chiefs have
to treat their own tawpo with great courtesy and respect,
address her as "your highness," accompany her on
journeys, use a separate set of nouns and verbs when
speaking to her. Here then is a discrepancy in which
the young girls who are kept in strict subjection within
their households, outrank their aunts and mothers in

[78]

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

the social life between villages. This ceremonial un-
dercutting of the older women's authority might seri-
ously jeopardise the discipline of the household, if it
were not for two considerations. The first is the tenu-
ousness of the girls' organisation, the fact that within
the village their chief raison (Tetre is to dance attend-
ance upon the older women, who have definite indus-
trial tasks to perform for the village j the second is the
emphasis upon the idea of service as the chief duty of
the tawpo. The village princess is also the village
servant. It is she who waits upon strangers, spreads
their beds and makes their kava, dances when they wish
it, and rises from her sleep to serve either the visitors
or her own chief. And she is compelled to serve the
social needs of the women as well as the men. Do they
decide to borrow thatch in another village, they dress
their tawpo in her best and take her along to decorate
the fnalaga. Her marriage is a village matter, planned
and carried through by the talking chiefs and their
wives who are her counsellors and chaperons. So that
the rank of the taupo is really a further daily inroad
upon her freedom as an individual, while the incessant
chaperonage to which she is subjected and the way in
which she is married without regard to her own wishes
are a. complete denial of her personality. And simi-
larly, the slighter prestige of her untitled sisters, whose
chief group activity is waitmg upon their elders, has
even less real significance in the daily life of the vil-
lage.

With the exception of the tawpo y the assumption of

[79]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

whose title is the occasion of a great festival and enor-
mous distribution of property by her chief to the talk-
ing chiefs who must hereafter support and confirm her
rank, a Samoan girl of good family has two ways of
making her debut. The first, the formal entry into the
Aualuma is often neglected and is more a formal fee
to the community than a recognition of the girl herself.
The second way is to go upon a malaga, a formal trav-
elling party. She may go as a near relative of the
taufo in which case she will be caught up in a whirl of
entertainment with which the young men of the host
village surround their guests; or she may travel as the
only girl in a small travelling party in which case she
will be treated as a taupo, (All social occasions demand
the presence of a taufOy a manalay and a talking chief j
and if individuals actually holding these titles are not
present, some one else has to play the role.) Thus it
is in inter-village life, either as a member of the
Aualuma who call upon and dance for the manaia of
the visiting malaga^ or as a visiting girl in a strange
village, that the unmarried Samoan girl is honoured
and recognised by her community.

But these are exceptional occasions. A malaga may
come only once a year, especially in Manu'a which
numbers only seven villages in the whole archipelago.
And in the daily life of the village, at crises, births,
deaths, marriages, the unmarried girls have no cere-
monial part to play. They are simply included with
the "women of the household" whose duty it is to pre-
pare the layette for the new baby, or carry stones to

[80]

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

strew on the new grave. It is almost as if the com-
munity by its excessive recognition of the girl as a
taupo or member of the Aualumay considered itself
exonerated from paying any more attention to her.

This attitude is fostered by the scarcity of taboos.
In many parts of Polynesia, all women, and especially
menstruating women, are considered contaminating and
dangerous. A continuous rigorous social supervision is
necessary, for a society can no more afford to ignore its
most dangerous members than it can afford to neglect
its most valuable. But in Samoa a girl's power of doing \
harm is very limited. She cannot make tafoloy a bread- r
fruit pudding usually made by the young men in any
case, nor make the kava while she is menstruating. But
she need retire to no special house j she need not eat
alone J there is no contamination in her touch or look.
In common with the young men and the older women,
a girl gives a wide berth to a place where chiefs are en-
gaged in formal work, unless she has special business
there. It is not the presence of a woman which is inter-
dicted but the uncalled-for intrusion of any one of
either sex. No woman can be officially present at a
gathering of chiefs unless she is tau-po making the kava,
but any woman may bring her husband his pipe or come
to deliver a message, so long as her presence need not
be recognised. The only place where a woman's femi-
ninity is in itself a real source of danger is in the matter
of fishing canoes and fishing tackle which she is for-
bidden to touch upon pain of spoiling the fishing. But
the enforcement of this prohibition is in the hands of

- [8i]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

individual fishermen in whose houses the fishing equip-
ment is kept.

Within the relationship group matters are entirely
different. Here women are very specifically recog-
nised. The oldest female progenitor of the line, that
is, the sister of the last holder of the title, or his
predecessor's sister, has special rights over the distri-
bution of the dowry which comes into the household.
She holds the veto in the selling of land and other im-
portant family matters. Her curse is the most dread-
ful a man can incur for she has the power to "cut the
line" and make the name extinct. If a man falls ill,
it is his sister who must first take the formal oath that
she has wished him no harm, as anger in her heart is
most potent for evil. When a man dies, it is his pa-
ternal aunt or his sister who prepares the body for
burial, anointing it with turmeric and rubbing it with
oil, and it is she who sits beside the body, fanning away
the flies, and keeps the fan in her possession ever after.
And, in the more ordinary affairs of the household, in
the economic arrangements-betwccn-t^eiat-iv^y in dis-
putes over propert y or in f amily feuds, the women play
as^active a part as the men.

The girl and woman repays the general social negli-
gence which she receives with a corresponding insou-
ciance. She treats the lore of the village, the gene-
alogies of the titles, tke origin myths and local tales,
the intricacies of the social organisation with supreme
indifference. It is an exceptional girl who can give her
great-grandfather's name, the exceptional boy who can-

[82]

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

not give his genealogy in traditional form for several
generations. While the boy of sixteen or seventeen is
eagerly trying to master the esoteric allusiveness of the
talking chief whose style he most admires, the girl of
the same age learns the minimum of etiquette. Yet
this is in no wise due to lack of ability. The tatipo must
have a meticulous knowledge, not only of the social
arrangements of her own village, but also of those of
neighbouring villages. She must serve visitors in proper
form and with no hesitation after the talking chief has
chanted their titles and the names of their kava cups.
Should she take the wrong post which is the preroga-
tive of another taufo who outranks her, her hair will
be soundly pulled by her rival's female attendants.
She learns the intricacies of the social organisation as
well as her brother does. Still more notable is the case
of the wife of a talking chief. Whether she is chosen
for her docility by a man who has already assumed his
title, or whether, as is often the case, she marries some
boy of her acquaintance who later is made a talking
chief, the tausiy wife of a talking chief, is quite equal
to the occasion. In the meetings of women she must
be a master of etiquette and the native rules of order,
she must interlard her speeches with a wealth of unin-
telligible traditional material and rich allusiveness, she
must preserve the same even voice, the same lofty de-
meanour, as her husband. And ultimately, the wife of
an important talking chief must qualify as a teacher as
well as a performer, for it is her duty to train the taufo.
But unless the community thus recognises her existence,

[83]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

and makes formal demand upon her time and ability,
a woman gives to it a bare minimum of her attention.

In like manner, women are not dealt with in the.
primitive penal code. A man who commits adultery
with a chief's wife was beaten and banished, sometimes
even drowned by the outraged community, but the
woman was only cast out by her husband. The taufo
who was found not to be a virgin was simply beaten by
her female relatives. To-day if evil befalls the village,
and it is attributed to some unconfessed sin on the part
of a member of the community, the Fono and the
Aumaga are convened and confession is enjoined upon
any one who may have evil upon his conscience, but no
such demand is made upon the Aualuma or the wives
of the matals. This is in striking contrast to the family
confessional where the sister is called upon first.

In matters of work the village makes a few precise
demands. It is the women's work to cultivate the
sugar cane and~sew tlie""thatcE f or WeTooFoT'the giiest
IlDiise^^to weave the palm leaf blinds, and bring the
coral_rubble for tIie"~ffoof. When the girls "have 1a
paper mulberry plantation, the Aumaga occasionally
help them in the work, the girls in turn making a feast
for the boys, turning the whole affair into an indus-
^>— trious picnic. But between men's formal work and
women's formal work there is a rigid division. Women
do not enter into house-building or boat-building ac-
tivities, nor go out in fishing canoes, nor may men enter
the formal weaving house or the house where women
are making tapa in a group. If the women's work

[84]

THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY

makes it necessary for them to cross the village, as is
the case when rubble is brough: up from the seashore
to make the floor of the guest house, the men entirely
disappear, either gathering in some remote house, or
going away to the bush or to another village. But this
avoidance is only for large formal occasions. If her
husband is building the family a new cook-house, a
woman may make tapa two feet away, while a chief
may sit and placidly braid cinet while his wife weaves
a fine mat at his elbow.

So, although unlike her husband and brothers a n
woman spends most of her time within the narrower :\
circle of her household and her relationship group,
when she does participate in community affairs she is
treated with the punctilio which marks all phases of
Samoan social life. The better part of her attention
and interest is focused on a smaller group, cast in a
more personal mode. For this reason, it is impossible
to evaluate accurately the difference in innate social
drive between men and women in Samoa. In those-i
social spheres where women have been given an oppor- I
tunity, they take their place with as much ability as the I
men. The wives of the talking chiefs in fact exhibit |
even greater adaptability than their husbands. The
talking chiefs are especially chosen for their oratorical
and intellectual abilities, whereas the women have a
task thrust upon them at their marriage requiring great
oratorical skill, a fertile imagination, tact, and a facile
memory.

[85]

VII

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

THE first attitude which a little girl learns towards
boys is one of avoidance and antagonism. She learns
to observe the brother and sister taboo towards the boys
of her relationship group and household, and together
v/ith the other small girls of her age group she treats
all other small boys as enemies elect. After a little
girl is eight or nine years of age she has learned never
to approach a group of older boys. This feeling of
antagonism towards younger boys and shamed avoid-
ance of older ones continues up to the age of thirteen
or fourteen, to the group of girls who are just reach-
ing puberty and the group of boys who have just been
circumcised. These children are growing away from
the age-group life and the age-group antagonisms.
They are not yet actively sex-eonscious. And it is at
this time that relationships between the sexes are least
emotionally charged. Not until she is an old married
woman with several children will the Samoan girl
again regard the opposite sex so quietly. When these
adolescent children gather together there is a good-
natured banter, a minimum of embarrassment, a great
deal of random teasing which usually takes the form
of accusing some little girl of a consuming passion for

[86]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

a decrepit old man of eighty, or some small boy of
being the father of a buxom matron's eighth child.
Occasionally the banter takes the form of attributing
affection between two age mates and is gaily and indig-
nantly repudiated by both. Children at this age meet
at informal siva parties, on the outskirts of more for-
mal occasions, at community reef fishings (when many
yards of reef have been enclosed to make a great fish
trap) and on torch-fishing excursions. Good-natured
tussling and banter and co-operation in common activi-
ties are the keynotes of these occasions. But unfortu-
nately these contacts are neither frequent nor suffi-
ciently prolonged to teach the girls co-operation or to
give either boys or girls any real appreciation of per-
sonality in members of the opposite sex.

Two or three years later this will all be changed.
The fact that little girls no longer belong to age groups
makes the individual's defection less noticeable. The
boy who begins to take an active interest in girls is also
seen less in a gang and spends more time with one close
companion. Girls have lost all of their nonchalance.
They giggle, blush, bridle, run away. Boys become
shy, embarrassed, taciturn, and avoid the society of
girls in the daytime and on the brilliant moonlit nights
for which they accuse the girls of having an exhibition-
istic preference. Friendships fall more strictly within
the relationship group. The boy's need for a trusted
confidante is stronger than that of the girl, for only the
most adroit and hardened Don Juans do their own

[87]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

courting. There are occasions, of course, when two
youngsters just past adolescence, fearful of ridicule,
even from their nearest friends and relatives, will slip
away alone into the bush. More frequently still an
older man, a widower or a divorced man, will be a
girl's first lover. And here there is no need for an
ambassador. The older man is neither shy nor fright-
ened, and furthermore there is no one whom he can
trust as an intermediary; a younger man would betray
hjm, an older man would not take his amours seriously,
j But the first spontaneous experiment of adolescent chil-
/ dren and the amorous excursions of the older men
among the young girls of the village are variants on
the edge of the recognised types of relationships j so
also is the first experience of a young boy with an older
woman. But both of these are exceedingly frequent
occurrences, so that the success of an amatory experience
is seldom jeopardised by double ignorance. Neverthe-
less, all of these occasions are outside the recognised
forms into which sex relations fall. The little boy and
girl are branded by their companions as guilty of
tautala lai t'ltl (presuming above their ages) as is
the boy who loves or aspires to love an older woman,
while the idea of an older man pursuing a young girl
appeals strongly to their sense of humour j or if the
girl is very young and naive, to their sense of unfit-
ness. "She is too young, too young yet. He is too
old," they will say, and the whole weight of vigorous
disapproval fell upon a matal who was known to be

[88]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

the father of the child of Lotu, the sixteen-year-old
feeble-minded girl on Olesega. Discrepancy in age or
experience always strikes them as comic or pathetic ac-
cording to the degree. The theoretical punishment
which is meted out to a disobedient and runaway
daughter is to marry her to a very old man, and I
have heard a nine-year-old giggle contemptuously over
her mother's preference for a seventeen-year-old boy.
Worst among these unpatterned deviations is that of
the man who makes love to some young and dependent
woman of his household, his adopted child or his wife's
younger sister. The cry of incest is raised against him
and sometimes feeling runs so high that he has to leave
the group.

Besides formal marriage there are only two types
of sex relations which receive any formal recognition
from the community^love affairs between unmarried
young people (this includes the widowed) who are very
nearly of the same age, whether leading to marriage or
merely a passing diversion j and adultery.

Between the unmarried there are three forms of
relationship: the clandestine encounter, "under the
palm trees," the published elopement, Avaga, and the ^
ceremonious courtship in which the boy "sits before the
girl"} and on the edge of these, the curious form of
surreptitious rape, called nioetotoloy sleep crawling, re-
sorted to by youths who find favour in no maiden's
eyes.

In these three relationships, the boy requires a con-

[89]

./'

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

fidant and ambassador whom he calls a soa. Where
boys are close companions, this relationship may extend
over many love affairs, or it may be a temporary one,
terminating with the particular love affair. The soa
follows the pattern of the talking chief who makes
material demands upon his chief in return for the im-
material services which he renders him. If marriage
results from his ambassadorship, he receives a specially
fine present from the bridegroom. The choice of a
soa presents many difficulties. If the lover chooses a
steady, reliable boy, some slightly younger relative de-
voted to his interests, a boy unambitious in affairs of
the heart, very likely the ambassador will bungle the
whole affair through inexperience and lack of tact. But
if he chooses a handsome and expert wooer who knows
just how "to speak softly and walk gently," then as
likely as not the girl will prefer the second to the
principal. This difficulty is occasionally anticipated by
employing two or three soas and setting them to spy
on each other. But such a lack of trust is likely to in-
spire a similar attitude in the agents, and as one over-
cautious and disappointed lover told me ruefully, "I
had five soasy one was true and four were false."

Among possible soas there are two preferences, a
brother or a girl. . A brother is by definition loyal,
while a girl is far more skilful for "a boy can only
approach a girl in the evening, or when no one is by,
but a girl can go with her all day long, walk with her
and lie on the mat by her, eat off the same platter, and

[90]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

whisper between mouthfuls the name of the boy, speak-
ing ever of him, how good he is, how gentle and how
true, how worthy of love. Yes, best of all is the
soafafiney the woman ambassador." But the difficulties
of obtaining a soafafine are great. A boy may not^
choose from his own female relatives. The taboo for-
bids him ever to mention such matters in their pres-
ence. It is only by good chance that his brother's
sweetheart may be a relative of the girl upon whom
he has set his heart j or some other piece of good for-
tune may throw him into contact with a girl or woman
who will act in his interests. The most violent antago-
nisms in the young people's groups are not between ex-
lovers, arise not from the venom of the deserted nor the
smarting pride of the jilted, but occur between the boy
and the soa who has betrayed him, or a lover and the
friend of his beloved who has in any way blocked his
suit.

In the strictly clandestine love affair the lover never
presents himself at the house of his beloved. His soa
may go there in a group or upon some trumped-up
errand, or he also may avoid the house and find op-
portunities to speak to the girl while she is fishing or
going to and from the plantation. It is his task to sing
his friend's praise, counteract the girl's fears and ob-
jections, and finally appoint a rendezvous. These af-
fairs are usually of short duration and both boy and
girl may be carrying on several at once. One of the
recognised causes of a quarrel is the resentment of the

[91]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

first lover against his successor of the same night, "for
the boy who came later will mock him." These clan-
destine lovers make their rendezvous on the outskirts
of the village. "Under the palm trees" is the conven-
tionalised designation of this type of intrigue. Very
often three or four couples will have a common ren-
dezvous, when either the boys or the girls are relatives
who are friends. Should the girl ever grow faint or
dizzy, it is the boy's part to climb the nearest palm and
fetch down a fresh cocoanut to pour on her face in lieu
of eau de cologne. In native theory, barrenness is the
punishment of promiscuity j and, vice versa, only per-
sistent monogamy is rewarded by conception. When
a pair of clandestine experimenters whose rank is so
low that their marriages are not of any great economic
importance become genuinely attached to each other
and maintain the relationship over several months, mar-
riage often follows. And native sophistication distin-
guishes between the adept lover whose adventures are
many and of short duration and the less skilled man
who can find no better proof of his virility than a long
affair ending in conception.

Often the girl is afraid to venture out into the night,
infested with ghosts and devils, ghosts that strangle
one, ghosts from far-away villages who come in canoes
to kidnap the girls of the village, ghosts who leap upon
the back and may not be shaken off. Or she may feel
that it is wiser to remain at home, and if necessary,
attest her presence vocally. In this case the lover

[92]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

braves the house j taking off his lavalava, he greases
his body thoroughly with cocoanut oil so that he can
slip through the fingers of pursuers and leave no trace,
and stealthily raises the blinds and slips into the house.
The prevalence of this practice gives point to the fa-
miliar incident in Polynesian folk tales of the ill for-
tune that falls the luckless hero who "sleeps until
morning, until the rising sun reveals his presence to
the other inmates of the house." As perhaps a dozen
or more people and several dogs are sleeping in the
house, a due regard for silence is sufficient precaution.
But it is this habit of domestic rendezvous which lends . y
itself to the peculiar abuse of the moetotoloy or sleep
crawler.

The moetotolo is the only sex activity which presents
a definitely abnormal picture. Ever since the first
contact with white civilisation, rape, in the form of vio- -'
lent assault, has occurred occasionally in Samoa. It is
far less congenial, however, to the Samoan attitude
than moetotoloy in which a man stealthily appropriates
the favours which are meant for another. The need
for guarding against discovery makes conversation im-
possible, and the sleep crawler relies upon the girPs
expecting a lover or the chance that she will indiscrimi-
nately accept any comer. If the girl suspects and re-
sents him, she raises a great outcry and the whole
household gives chase. fCatching a moetotolo is countedji
great sport, and the women, who feel their safety en- |^
dangered, are even more active in pursuit than the i

[93]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

men. One luckless youth in Luma neglected to re-
move his lavalava. The girl discovered him and her
sister succeeded in biting a piece out of his lavalava
before he escaped. This she proudly exhibited the
next day. As the boy had been too dull to destroy his
lavalava, the evidence against him was circumstantial
and he was the laughing stock of the village j the chil-
dren wrote a dance song about it and sang it after him
wherever he went. The moetotolo problem is compli-
cated by the possibility that a boy of the household
may be the offender and may take refuge in the hue
and cry following the discovery. It also provides the
girl with an excellent alibi, since she has only to call
out "moetotolo^^ in case her lover is discovered. "To
the family and the village that may be a moetotoloy
but it is not so in the hearts of the girl and the boy."
Two. motives a,re given for this unsavoury activity,
anger and failure in love. The Samoan girl who plays
the coquette does so at her peril. "She will say, *Yes,
I will meet you to-night by that old cocoanut tree just
beside the devilfish stone when the moon goes down.'
And the boy will wait and wait and wait all night long.
It will grow very darkj lizards will drop on his head;
the ghost boats will come into the channel. He will
be very much afraid. But he will wait there until
dawn, until his hair is wet with dew and his heart is
very angry and still she does not come. Then in re-
venge he will attempt a moetotolo. Especially will he
do so if he hears that she has met another that night."

[94]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

The other set explanation is that a particular boy can-
not win a sweetheart by any legitimate means, and there
is no form of prostitution, except guest prostitution in
Samoa. As some of the boys who were notorious
7noetotolos were among the most charming and good-
looking youths of the village, this is a little hard to
understand. Apparently, these youths, frowned upon
in one or two tentative courtships, inflamed by the
loudly proclaimed success of their fellows and the
taunts against their own inexperience, cast established
wooing procedure to the winds and attempt a moeto-
tolo. And once caught, once branded, no girl will ever
pay any attention to them again. They must wait until
as older men, with position and title to offer, they can
choose between some weary and bedraggled wanton or
the unwilling young daughter of ambitious and selfish
parents. But years will intervene before this is pos-
sible, and shut out from the amours in which his com-
panions are engaging, a boy makes one attempt after
another, sometimes successfully, sometimes only to be
caught and beaten, mocked by the village, and always
digging the pit deeper under his feet. Often par-
tially satisfactory solutions are relationships with men.
There was one such pair in the village, a notorious
tnoetotoloy and a serious-minded youth who wished to
keep his heart free for political intrigue. The moeto-
tolo therefore complicates and adds zest to the surrep-
titious love-making which is conducted at home, while
the danger of being missed, the undesirability of chance

[95]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

encounters abroad, rain and the fear of ghosts, com-
plicate "love under the palm trees."
.♦ Between these strictly suh rosa affairs and a final offer
of marriage there is an intermediate form of courtship
in which the girl is called upon by the boy. As this is^
regarded as a tentative move towards matrimony, both
relationship groups must be more or less favourably
inclined towards the union. With his soa at his side
and provided with a basket of fish, an octopus or so, or a
chicken, the suitor presents himself at the girPs home
before the late evening meal. If his gift is accepted,
it is a sign that the family of the girl are willing for
him to pay his addresses to her. He is formally wel-
comed by the mata'ty sits with reverently bowed head
throughout the evening prayer, and then he and his soa
stay for supper. But the suitor does not approach his
beloved. They say: "If you wish to know who is really
the lover, look then not at the boy who sits by her side,
looks boldly into her eyes and twists the flowers in her
necklace around his fingers or steals the hibiscus flower
from her hair that he may wear it behind his ear. Do
not think it is he who whispers softly in her ear, or says
to her, ^Sweetheart, wait for me to-night. After the
moon has set, I will come to you,' or who teases her by
saying she has many lovers. Look instead at the boy
who sits afar off, who sits with bent head and takes no
part in the joking. And you will see that his eyes are
always turned softly on the girl. Always he watches
her and never does he miss a movement of her lips.

[96]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

Perhaps she will wink at him, perhaps she will raise her
eyebrows, perhaps she will make a sign with her hand.
He must always be wakeful and watching or he will
miss it." The soa meanwhile pays the girl elaborate
and ostentatious court and in undertones pleads the
cause of his friend. After dinner, the centre of the
house is accorded the young people to play cards, sing
or merely sit about, exchanging a series of broad
pleasantries. This type of courtship varies from occa-
sional calls to daily attendance. The food gift need not
. ac£aCQj3any...Xach y]sit, but is as essential at the initial
call as is an introduction in the West. The way of such
declared lovers is hard. The girl does not wish to
marry, nor to curtail her amours in deference to a
definite betrothal. Possibly she may also dislike her
suitor, while he in turn may be the victim of family
ambition. Now that the whole village knows him for
her suitor, the girl gratifies her vanity by avoidance,
by perverseness. He comes in the evening, she has gone
to another house j he follows her there, she immediately
returns home. When such courtship ripens into an
accepted proposal of marriage, the boy often goes to
sleep in the house of his intended bride and often the
union is surreptitiously consummated. vTeremonial mar-
riage is deferred until such time as the boy's family— ^-^
have planted or collected enough food and other prop/ '
erty and the girl's family have gotten together a suitable
dowry of tapa and mats. >J

In such manner are conducted the love affairs of the

[97]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

average young pecrple of the same village, and of the
plebeian young people of neighbouring villages. From
this free and easy experimentation, the taufo Is ex-
cepted. Virginity is a legal requirement for Ker. At
her marriage, in front of all the people, in a house bril-
liantly lit, the talking chief of the bridegroom will take
the tokens of her virginity.* In former days should
bhe prove not to be a virgin, her female relatives fell
upon and beat her with stones, disfiguring and some-
times fatally injuring the girl who had shamed their
house. The public ordeal sometimes prostrated the girl
for as much as a week, although ordinarily a girl re-
covers from first intercourse in two or three hours, and
women seldom lie abed more than a few hours after
childbirth. Although this virginity-testing ceremony
was theoretically observed at weddings of people of all
ranks, it was simply ignored if the boy knew that it was
an idle form, and "a wise girl who is not a virgin will
tell the talking chief of her husband, so that she be
not shamed before all the people."

The attitude towards virginity is a curious one.
Christianity has, of course, introduced a moral premium
on chastity. The Samoans regard this attitude with
reverent but complete scepticism and the concept of
celibacy is absolutely meaningless to them. But vir-
ginity definitely adds to a girl's attractiveness, the woo-
ing of a virgin Is considered far more of a feat than

* This custom is now forbidden by law, but is only gradually
dying out.

[98]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

the conquest of a more experienced heart, and a really
successful Don Juan turns most of his attention to their
seduction. One youth who at twenty-four married a
girl who was still a virgin was the laughing stock of the
village over his freely related trepidation which re-
vealed the fact that at twenty-four, although he had
had many love affairs, he had never before won the
favours of a virgin.

The bridegroom, his relatives and the bride and her
relatives all receive prestige if she proves to be a virgin,
so that the girl of rank who might wish to forestall this
painful public ceremony is thwarted not only by the
anxious chaperonage of her relatives but by the boy's
eagerness for prestige. One young Lothario eloped
to his father's house with a girl of high rank from an-
other village and refused to live with her because, said
he, "I thought maybe I would marry that girl and
there would be a big nialaga and a big ceremony and I
would wait and get the credit for marrying a virgin.
But the next day her father came and said that she could
not marry me, and she cried very much. So I said to
her, *Well, there is no use now to wait any longer.
Now we will run away into the bush.' " It is con-
ceivable that the girl would often trade the temporary
prestige for an escape from the public ordeal, but in
proportion as his ambitions were honourable^ the boy
would frustrate her efforts.

Just as the clandestine and casual "love under the
palm trees" is the pattern irregularity for those of hum-

[99]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ble birth, so the elopement has its archetype in the love
affairs of the taufOy and the other chiefs' daughters.
These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded j not
for them are secret trysts at night or stolen meetings
in the day time. Where parents of lower rank com-
placently ignore their daughters' experiments, the high
chief guards his daughter's virginity as he guards the
honour of his name, his precedence in the kava cere-
mony or any other prerogative of his high degree.
Some old woman of the household is told off to be
the girl's constant companion and duenna. The taufo
may not visit in other houses in the village, or leave
the house alone at night. When she sleeps, an older
woman sleeps by her side. Never may she go to an-
other village unchaperoned. In her own village she
goes soberly about her tasks, bathing in the sea, work-
ing in the plantation, safe under the jealous guardian-
ship of the women of her own village. She runs little
risk from the moetotolo, for. one who outraged the
tau-po of his village would formerly have been beaten
to death, and now would have to flee from the vil-
lage. The prestige of the village is inextricably bound
up with the high repute of the taufo and few young
men in the village would dare to be her lovers. Mar-
riage to them is out of the question, and their com-
panions would revile them as traitors rather than envy
them such doubtful distinction. Occasionally a youth
of very high rank in the same village will risk an
elopement, but even this is a rare occurrence. For

[lOo]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

tradition says that the taupo must marry outside her
village, marry a high chief or a mana'ia of another vil-
lage. Such a marriage is an occasion for great festivi-
ties and solemn ceremony. The chief and all of his
talking chiefs must come to propose for her hand, come
in person bringing gifts for her talking chiefs. If the
talking chiefs of the girl are satisfied that this is a
lucrative and desirable match, and the family are satis-
fied with the rank and appearance of the suitor, the^
marriage is agreed upon. Little attention is paid to the
opinion of the girl. So fixed is the idea that the mar-
riage of the taufo is the affair of the talking chiefs that
Europeanised natives on the main island, refuse to
make their daughters taufos because the missionaries
say a girl should make her own choice, and once she is
a taupOj they regard the matter as inevitably taken out
of their hands. After the betrothal is agreed upon the
bridegroom returns to his village to collect food and
property for the wedding. His village sets aside a
piece of land which is called the "Place of the Lady"
and is her property and the property of her children
forever, and on this land they build a house for the
bride. Meanwhile, the bridegroom has left behind him
in the house of the bride, a talking chief, the counter-
part of the humbler soa. This is one of the talking
chief's best opportunities to acquire wealth. He stays
as the emissary of his chief, to watch over his future
bride. He works for the bride's family and each week
the matai of the bride must reward him with a hand-

[lOlJ

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

some present. As an affianced wife of a chief, more and
more circumspect conduct is enjoined upon the girl.
Did she formerly joke with the boys of the village, she
must joke no longer, or the talking chief, on the watch
for any lapse from high decorum, will go home to his
chief and report that his bride is unworthy of such hon-
our. This custom is particularly susceptible to second
thought on the part of either side. Does the bride-
groom repent of the bargain, he bribes his talking chief
(who is usually a young man, not one of the important
talking chiefs who will benefit greatly by the marriage
itself) to be oversensitive to the behaviour of the bride
or the treatment he receives in the bride's family. And
this is the time in which the bride will elope, if her
affianced husband is too unacceptable. For while no
boy of her own village will risk her dangerous favours,
a boy from another village will enormously enhance
his prestige if he elopes with the taufo of a rival com-
munity. Once she has eloped, the projected alliance is
of course broken off, although her angry parents may
refuse to sanction her marriage with her lover and
marry her for punishment to some old man.

So great is the prestige won by the village, one of
whose young men succeeds in eloping with a tau-po, that
often the whole effort of a malaga is concentrated upon
abducting the taupo, whose virginity will be respected
in direct ratio to the chances of her family and village
consenting to ratify the marriage. As the abductor is

[102]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

often of high rank, the village often ruefully accepts
the compromise.

This elopement pattern, given meaning by the re-
strictions under which the taupo lives and this inter-
village rivalry, is carried down to the lower ranks where
indeed it is practically meaningless. Seldom is the
chaperonage exercised over the girl of average family
severe enough to make elopement the only way of con-
summating a love affair. But the elopement is spec-
tacular; the boy wishes to increase his reputation as a
successful Don Juan, and the girl wishes to proclaim
her conquest and also often hopes that the elopement
will end in marriage. The eloping pair run away to
the parents of the boy or to some of his relatives and
wait for the girl's relatives to pursue her. As one boy
related the»tale of such an adventure: "We ran away in
the rain, nine miles to Leone, in the pouring rain, to my
father's house. The next day her family came to get
her, and my father said to me, *How is it, do you wish
to marry this girl, shall I ask her father to leave her ^
here?' And I said, *Oh, no. I just eloped with her forJ^pV\
public information.' " Elopements are much less fre-'
quent than the clandestine love affairs because the girl
takes far more risk. She publicly renounces her often ]?
nominal claims to virginity; she embroils herself with j,
her family, who in former times, and occasionally even
to-day, would beat her soundly and shave off her hair.
Nine times out of ten, her lover's only motive is vanity

[103]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

2jid display, for the boy's say, "The girls hate a moeto-
toloy but they all love an avaga (eloping) man."

The elopement also occurs as a practical measure
when one family is opposed to a marriage upon which
a pair of young people have determined. The young
people take refuge with the friendly side of the family.
But unless the recalcitrant family softens and consents
to legalise the marriage by a formal exchange of prop-
erty, the principals can do nothing to establish their
status. A young couple may have had several children
and still be classed as "elopers," and if the marriage is
finally legalised after long delay, this stigma will
always cling to them. It is far more serious a one than
a mere accusation of sexual irregularity, for there is a
definite feeling that the whole community procedure
has been outraged by a pair of young upstarts.

Reciprocal gift-giving relations are maintained be-
^ tween the two families as long as the marriage lasts, and
leven afterwards if there are children. The birth of
each child, the death of a member of either household,
a visit of the wife to her family, or if he lives with her
people, of the husband to his, is marked by the presenta-
tion of gifts.

In premarital relationships, a convention of love
making is strictly adhered to. True, this is a convention
of speech, rather than of action. A boy declares that he
will die if a girl refuses him her favours, but the Sa-
moans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity
to a long absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that

[104]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

one love will quickly cure another. The fidelity which
is followed by pregnancy is taken as proof positive of
a real attachment, although having many mistresses is
never out of harmony with a declaration of affection
for each. The composition of ardent love songs, the
fashioning of long and flowery love letters, the invoca-
tion of the moon, the stars and the sea in verbal court-
ship, all serve to give Samoan love-making a close
superficial resemblance to our own, yet the attitude is
far closer ^o that of Schnitzler's hero in The Ajfairs of
Anatol. pRomantic love as it occurs in our civilisation,
inextricabty bound up with ideas of monogamy, ex-
clusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not
occur in Samoa.) Our attitude is a compound, the final
result of many converging lines of development in
Western civilisation, of the institution of monogamy,
of the ideas of the age of chivalry, of the ethics of ^
Christianity. Even a passionate attachment to one per-
son which lasts for a long period and persists in the face i
of discouragement but does not bar out other relation-
ships, is rare among the Samoans. Marriage, on the
other hand, is regarded as a social and economic ar- /
rangement, in which relative wealth, rank, and skill of
husband and wife, all must be taken into consideration.
There are many marriages in which both individuals,
especially if they are over thirty, are completely faith-
ful. But this must be attributed to the ease of sexual
adjustment on the one hand, and to the ascendency of
other interests, social organisation for the men, children

[i05l

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

for the women, over sex interests, rather than to a pas-
sionate fixation upon the partner in the marriage. As
the Samoans lack the inhibitions and the intricate spe-
cialisation of sex feeling which make marriages of con-
venience unsatisfactory, it is possible to bulwark marital
happiness with other props than temporary passionate
devotion. Suitability and expediency become the de-
ciding factors.

Adultery does not necessarily mean a broken mar-
riage. A chief's wife who commits adultery is deemed
to have dishonoured her high position, and is usually
discarded, although the chief will openly resent her re-
marriage to any one of lower rank. If the lover is con-
sidered the more culpable, the village will take public
vengeance upon him. In less conspicuous cases the
amount of fuss which is made over adultery is de-
pendent upon the relative rank of the offender and
offended, or the personal jealousy which is only occa-
sionally aroused. If either the injured husband or the
injured wife is sufficiently incensed to threaten physical
violence, the trespasser may have to resort to a public
ifoga, the ceremonial humiliation before some one
whose pardon is asked. He goes to the house of the
man he has injured, accompanied by all the men of his
household, each one wrapped in a fine mat, the currency
of the country J the suppliants seat themselves outside
the house, fine mats spread over their heads, hands
folded on their breasts, heads bent in attitudes of the
deepest dejection and humiliation. "And if the man is

[io6]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

very angry he will say no word. All day he will go
about his business j he will braid cinet with a quick hand,
he will talk loudly to his wife, and call out greetings to
those who pass in the roadway, but he will take no
notice of those who sit on his own terrace, who dare not
raise their eyes or make any movement to go away. In
olden days, if his heart was not softened, he might take
a club and together with his relatives go out and kill
those who sit without. But now he only keeps them
waiting, waiting all day long. The sun will beat down
upon them J the rain will come and beat on their heads
and still he will say no word. Then towards evening he
will say at last: *Come, it is enough. Enter the house
and drink the kava. Eat the food which I will set
before you and we will cast our trouble into the sea.' "
Then the fine mats are accepted as payment for the in-
jury, the ifoga becomes a matter of village history and
old gossips will say, "Oh, yes, Lua ! no, she's not lona's
child. Her father is that chief over in the next village.
He ifod to lona before she was born." If the offender
is of much lower rank than the injured husband, his
chief, or his father (if he is only a young boy) will have
to humiliate himself in his place. Where the offender
is a woman, she and her female relatives will make
similar amends. But they will run far greater danger
of being roundly beaten and berated j the peaceful
teachings of Christianity — perhaps because they were
directed against actual killing, rather than the slightly
less fatal encounters of women — have made far less

[107]

' COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

change in the belligerent activities of the women than
in those of the men.

If, on the other hand, a wife really tires of her hus-
band, or a husband of his wife, divorce is a simple and
informal matter, the non-resident simply going home to
his or her family, and the relationship is said to have
"passed away." It is a very brittle monogamy, often
trespassed and more often broken entirely. But many
adulteries occur — ^between a young marriage-shy bache-
lor and a married woman, or a temporary widower and
some young girl — which hardly threaten the continuity
of established relationships. The claim that a woman
has on her family's land renders her as independent as
her husband, and so there are no marriages of any dura-
tion in which either person is actively unhappy. A tiny
flare-up and a woman goes home to her own people j
if her husband does not care to conciliate her, each seeks
another mate.

Within the family, the wife obeys and serves her
husband, in theory, though of course, the hen-pecked
husband is a frequent phenomenon. In families of
high rank, her personal service to her husband is taken
over by the taupo and the talking chief but the wife
always retains the right to render a high chief sacred
personal services, such as cutting his hair. A wife's
rank can never exceed her husband's because it is always
directly dependent upon it. Her family may be richer
and more illustrious than his, and she may actually exer-
cise more influence over the village affairs through her

[io8]

FORMAL SEX RELATIONS

blood relatives than he, but within the life of the house-
hold and the village, she is a lausiy wife of a talking
chief, or a faletua, wife of a chief. This sometimes
results in conflict, as in the case of Pusa who was the
sister of the last holder of the highest title on the
island. This title was temporarily extinct. She was
also the wife of the highest chief in the village. Should
her brother, the heir, resume the higher title, her hus-
band's rank and her rank as his wife would suffer.
Helping her brother meant lowering the prestige of
her husband. As she was the type of woman who cared
a great deal more for wire pulling than for public recog-
nition, she threw her influence in for her brother. Such
conflicts are not uncommon, but they present a clear-cut
choice, usually reinforced by considerations of residence.
If a woman lives in her husband's household, and
if, furthermore, that household is in another village, her
interest is mainly enlisted in her husband's cause j but
if she lives with her own family, in her own village, her
allegiance is likely to cling to the blood relatives from
whom she receives reflected glory and informal privi-
lege, although no status.

[109]

VIII

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

DANCING is the only activity In which almost all ages
and both sexes participate and it therefore offers a
unique opportunity for an analysis of educatipn.

In the dance there are virtuosos but no formal teach-
ers. It is a highly individual activity set in a social
framework. This framework varies from a small danc-
ing party at which twelve to twenty people are present
to the major festivities of a malaga (travelling party)
or a wedding when the largest guest house in the village
is crowded within and encircled by spectators without.
With the size and importance of the festivity, the
formality of the arrangements varies also. Usually the
occasion of even a small siva (dance) is the presence of
at least two or three strange young people from another
village. The pattern entertainment is a division of the
performers into visitors and hosts, the two sides taking
turns in providing the music and dancing. This pattern
is still followed even when the malaga numbers only
two individuals, a number of hosts going over to swell
the visitors' ranks.

It is at these small informal dances that the children
learn to dance. In the front of the house sit the young
people who are the centre and arbiters of the occasion.

[no]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

The matai and his wife and possibly a related matai
and the other elders of the household sit at the back of
the house, in direct reversal of the customary procedure
according to which the place of the young people is in
the background. Around the ends cluster women and
children, and outside lurk the boys and girls who are
not participating in the dancing, although at any
moment they may be drawn into it. On such occasions
the dancing is usually started by the small children, be-
ginning possibly with seven- and eight-year-olds. The
chief's wife or one of the young men will call out the
names of the children and they are stood up in a group
of three, sometimes all boys or girls, sometimes with a
girl between two boys, which is the conventional adult
grouping for the taupo and her two talking chiefs. The
young men, sitting in a group near the centre of the
house, provide the music, one of them standing and
leading the singing to the accompaniment of an im-
ported stringed instrument which has taken the place of
the rude bamboo drum of earlier times. The leader sets
the key and the whole company join in either in the
song, or by clapping, or by beating on the floor with
their knuckles. The dancers themselves are the final
arbiters of the excellence of the music and it is not
counted as petulance for a dancer to stop in the middle
and demand better music as the price of continuing.
The songs sung are few in number j the young people
of one village seldom know more than a dozen airs j and
perhaps twice ^s many sets of words which are sung now

[ill]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

to one air, now to another. The verse pattern is simply
based upon the number of syllables j a change in stress
is permitted and rhyme is not demanded so that any
new event is easily set in the old pattern, and names
of villages and of individuals are inserted with great
freedom. The content of the songs is likely to take on
an extremely personal character containing many quips
at the expense of individuals and their villages.

The form of the participation of the audience changes
according to the age of the dancers. In the case of the
smaller children, it consists of an endless stream of good-
natured comment : "Faster ! " "Down lower ! Lower ! "
"Do it again!" ^^Fd.stcn your lavalava." In the danc-
ing of the more expert boys and girls the group takes
part by a steady murmur of "Thank you, thank you,
for your dancing!" "Beautiful! Engaging! Charm-
ing! Bravo!" which gives very much the effect of the
irregular stream of "Amens" at an evangelistic revival.
This articulate courtesy becomes almost lyric in quality
when the dancer is a person of rank for whom dancing
at all is a condescension.

The little children are put out upon these public
floors with a minimum of preliminary instruction. As
babies in their mothers' arms at just such a party as this,
they learned to clap before they learned to walk, so that
the beat is indelibly fixed in their minds. As two- and
three-year-olds they have stood on a mat at home and
clapped their hands in time to their elders' singing.
Now they are called upon to perform before a group.

[112]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

Wide-eyed, terrified babies stand beside some slightly
older child, clapping in desperation and trying to add
new steps borrowed on the spur of the moment from
their companions. Every improvement is greeted with
loud applause. The child who performed best at the
last party is haled forward at the next, for the group is
primarily interested in its own amusement rather than
in distributing an equal amount of practice among the
children. Hence some children rapidly outdistance the
rest, through interest and increased opportunity as well
as superior gift. This tendency to give the talented
child another and another chance is offset somewhat by
tivalry between relatives who wish to thrust their little
ones forward.

While the children are dancing, the older boys and
girls are refurbishing their costumes with flowers, shell
necklaces, anklets and bracelets of leaves. One or two
will probably slip off home and return dressed in
elaborate bark skirts. A bottle of cocoanut oil Is pro-
duced from the family chest and rubbed on the bodies
of the older dancers. Should a person of rank be
present and consent to dance, the hostess family bring
out their finest mats and tapas as costume. Sometimes
this impromptu dressing assumes such importance that
an adjoining house is taken over as a dressing roomj at
others it is of so informal a nature that spectators, who
have gathered outside arrayed only in sheets, have to
borrow a dress or a lavalava from some other spectator
before they can appear on the dance floor.

[113]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

The form of the dance itself is eminently individu-
alistic. No figures are prescribed except the half dozen
formal little claps which open the dance and the use of
one of a few set endings. There are twenty-five or
thirty figures, two or three set transitional positions, and
at least three definite styles, the dance of the taufOy
the dance of the boys, and the dance of the jesters.
These three styles relate definitely to the kind of dance
and not to the status of the dancer. The tauf6*s dance
is grave, aloof, beautiful. She is required to preserve a
set, dreamy, nonchalant expression of infinite hauteur
and detachment. The only permissible alternative to
this expression is a series of grimaces, impudent rather
than comic in nature and deriving their principal appeal
from the strong contrast which they present to the
more customary gravity. The manala also when he
dances in his mana'ia role is required to follow this same
decorous and dignified pattern. Most little girls and a
few little boys pattern their dancing on this convention.
Chiefs, on the rare occasions when they consent to dance,
and older women of rank have the privilege of choosing
between this style and the adoption of a comedian's
role. The boys' dance is much jollier than the girls'.
There is much greater freedom of movement and a
great deal of emphasis on the noise made by giving
rapid rhythmical slaps to the unclothed portions of the
body which produce a crackling tattoo of sound. This
style is neither salacious nor languorous although the
taupo^s dance is often both. It is athletic, slightly

[114]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

rowdy, exuberant, and owes much of its appeal to the
feats of rapid and difficult co-ordination which the slap-
ping involves. The jester's dance is peculiarly the
dance of those who dance upon either side of the tawpOy
or the manaiay and honour them by mocking them. It
is primarily the prerogative of talking chiefs and old
men and old women in general. The original motive is
contrast j the jester provides comic relief for the stately
dance of the tawpOy and the higher the rank of the tawpOy
the higher the rank of the men and women who will
condescend to act as clownish foils to her ability. The
dancing of these jesters is characterised by burlesque,
horseplay, exaggeration of the stereotyped figures, a
great deal of noise made by hammering on the open
mouth with spread palm, and a large amount of leap-
ing about and pounding on the floor. The clown is
occasionally so proficient that he takes the centre of the
floor on these ceremonious occasions.

The little girl who is learning to dance has these
three styles from which to choose, she has twenty-five
or thirty figures from which to compose her dance and
most important of all she has the individual dancers to
watch. My first interpretation of the skill of the
younger children was that they each took an older boy
or girl as a model and sedulously and slavishly copied
the whole dance. But I was not able to find a single
instance in which a child would admit or seemed in
any way conscious of having copied another j nor did I
find, after closer familiarity with the group, any

["5]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

younger child whose style of dancing could definitely
be referred to the imitation of another dancer. The
style of every dancer of any virtuosity is known to
every one in the village and when it is copied, it is
copied conspicuously so that Vaitogi, the little girl who
places her forearms parallel with the top of her head,
her palms flat on her head, and advances in a stooping
position, uttering hissing sounds, will be said to be danc-
ing a la Sina. There is no stigma upon such imitation j
the author does not resent it nor particularly glory in
it J the crowd does not upbraid it 3 but so strong is the
feeling for individualisation that a dancer will seldom
introduce more than one such feature into an evening's
performance J and when the dancing of two girls is
similar, it is similar in spite of the efforts of both, rather
than because of any attempt at imitation. Naturally,
the dancing of the young children is much more simi-
lar than the dancing of the young men and girls who
had had time and opportunity really to perfect a style.
The attitude of the elders towards precocity in sing-
ing, leading the singing or dancing, is in striking con-
trast to their attitude towards every other form of
precocity. On the dance floor the dreaded accusation,
"You are presuming above your age," is never heard.
Little boys who would be rebuked and possibly whipped
for such behaviour on any other occasion are allowed
to preen themselves, to swagger and bluster and take
the limelight without a word of reproach. The rela-
tives crow with delight over a precocity for which they

[116]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

would hide their heads in shame were it displayed in
any other sphere.

It is on these semi-formal occasions that the dance
really serves as an educational factor. The highly
ceremonious dance of the taupo or manaia and their
talking chiefs at a wedding or a malagay with its elab-
orate costuming, compulsory distribution of gifts, and
its vigilant attention to precedent and prerogative, offers
no opportunities to the amateur or the child. They may
only cluster outside the guest house and watch the pro-
ceedings. The existence of such a heavily stylized and
elaborate archetype of course serves an additional func-
tion in giving zest as well as precedent to the informal
occasions which partially ape its grandeur.

The significance of the dance in the education and
socialisation of Samoan children is two-fold. In the
first place it effectively offsets the rigorous subordi-
nation in which children are habitually kept. Here the
admonitions of the elders change from "Sit down and;%
keep still!" to "Stand up and dance!" The children''
are actually the centre of the group instead of its barely
tolerated fringes. The parents and relatives distribute
generous praise by way of emphasising their children's
superiority over the children of their neighbours or
their visitors. The ubiquitous ascendency of age is
somewhat relaxed in the interests of greater proficiency.
Each child is a person with a d efinite con tribution to
make regardless of sex and age. This emphasis on
individuality is carried to limits which seriously mar the

["?]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

dance as an aesthetic performance. The formal adult
dance with its row of dancers, the tawpo in the centre
and an even number of dancers on each side focussed
upon her with every movement directed towards ac-
centuating her dancing, loses both symmetry and unity
in the hands of the ambitious youngsters. Each dancer
moves in a glorious individualistic oblivion of the
others, there is no pretence of co-ordination or of sub-
ordinating the wings to the centre of the line. Often
a dancer does not pay enough attention to her fellow
dancers to avoid continually colliding with them. It
is a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibi-
tionism. This tendency, so blatantly displayed on
these informal occasions, does not mar the perfection
of the occasional formal dance when the solemnity of
the occasion becomes a sufficient check upon the partici-
pants' aggressiveness. The formal dance is of personal
significance only to people of rank or to the virtuoso to
whom it presents a perfect occasion for display.

The second influence of the dance is its reduction of
the threshold of shyness. There is as much difference
between one Samoan child and another in the matter of
shyness and self-consciousness as is apparent among our
children, but where our shyest children avoid the lime-
light altogether, the Samoan child looks pained and
anxious but dances just the same. The limelight is re-
garded as inevitable and the child makes at least a mini-
mum of effort to meet its requirements by standing up
and going through a certain number of motions. The

[ii8]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

beneficial effects of this early habituation to the public
eye and the resulting control of the body are more
noticeable in the case of boys than of girls. Fifteen-
and sixteen-year-old boys dance with a charm and a
complete lack of self -consciousness which is a joy to
watch. The adolescent girl whose gawky, awkward gait
and lack of co-ordination may be appalling, becomes a
graceful, self-possessed person upon the dance floor.
But this ease and poise does not seem to be carried over
into everyday life with the same facility as it is in the
case of young boys.

In one way this informal dance floor approximates
more closely to our educational methods than does any
lother aspect of Samoan education. For here the pre-
cocious child is applauded, made much of, given more
and more opportunities to show its proficiency while the
stupid child is rebuked, neglected and pushed to the
wall. This difference in permitted practice is reflected
in increasing differences in the skill of the children as
'they grow older. Inferiority feeling in the classic pic-
iture which is so frequent in our society is rare in Samoa.
Inferiority there seems to be derived from two sources,
clumsiness in sex relations which affects the young men
after they are grown and produces the moetotoloy and
clumsiness upon the dance floor. I have already told
the story of the little girl, shy beyond her fellows,
whom prospective high rank had forced into the lime-
light and made miserably diffident and self-conscious.

And the most unhappy of the older girls was Masina,

[119]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

a girl about three years past puberty. Masina could
not dance. Every one in the village knew that she
could not dance. Her contemporaries deplored itj the
younger children made fun of her. She had little
charm, was deprecating in her manner, awkward, shy
and ill at ease. All of her five lovers had been casual,
all temporary, all unimportant. She associated with
girls much younger than herself. She had no self-
confidence. No one sought her hand in marriage and
she would not marry until her family needed the kind
of property which forms a bride price.

It is interesting to notice that the one aspect of life
in which the elders actively discriminate against the less
proficient children seems to be the most powerful de-
terminant in giving the children a feeling of inferiority.

The strong emphasis upon dancing does not dis-
criminate against the physically defective. Instead
every defect is capitalised in the form of the dance or
compensated for by the perfection of the dance. I saw
one badly hunchbacked boy who had worked out a most
ingenious imitation of a turtle and also a combination
dance with another boy in which the other supported
him on his back. Ipu, the little albino, danced with
aggressive facility and with much applause, while mad
Laki, who suffered from a delusion that he was the
high chief of the island, was only too delighted to dance
for any one who addressed him with the elaborate
courtesy phrases suitable to his rank. The dumb
brother of the high chief of one village utilised his

[120]

THE ROLE OF THE DANCE

deaf mute gutturals as a running accompaniment to his
dance, while the brothers of a fourteen-year-old feeble-
minded mad boy were accustomed to deck his head
with branches which excited him to a frenzied rhyth-
mical activity, suggesting a stag whose antlers had been
caught in the bush. The most precocious girl dancer
in Tau was almost blind. So every defect, every
handicap was included in this universal, specialised ex-
ploitation of personality.

The dancing child is almost always a very different /
person from her everyday self. After long acquaint- ('
ance it is sometimes possible to guess the type of dance \
which a particular girl will do. This is particularly '
easy in the case of obviously tom-boy girls, but one is
continually fooled by the depths of sophistication in the
dancing of some pensive, dull child, or the lazy grace
of some noisy little hoodlum.

Formal dancing displays are a recognised social en-
tertainment and the highest courtesy a chief can offer
his guest is to have his taupo dance for him. So like-
wise the boys dance after they have been tattooed, the
manaia dances when he goes to woo his bride, the bride
dances at her wedding. In the midnight conviviality of
a malaga the dance often becomes flagrantly obscene
and definitely provocative in character, but both of these
are special developments of less importance than the
function of informal dancing in the development of
individuality and the compensation for repression of
personality In other spheres of life.

[I2l]

IX

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY

THE ease with which personality differences can be
adjusted by a change of residence prevents the Samoans
from pressing one another too hard. Their evaluations
of personality are g curious mixture of caution and
fatalism. There is one word musu which expresses un-
willingness and intractability, wTiether in the mistress
who refuses to welcome a hitherto welcome lover, the
chief who refuses to lend his kava bowl, the baby who
won't go to bed, or the talking chief who won't go on
a malaga. The appearance of a musu attitude is treated
with almost superstitious respect. Lovers will prescribe
formulae for the treatment of a mistress, "lest she be-
come musu" and the behaviour of the suppliant is care-
fully orientated in respect to this mysterious undesira-
bility. The feeling seems to be not that one is dealing
with an individual in terms of his peculiar preoccupa-
tions in order to assure a successful outcome of a per-
sonal relationship, appealing now to vanity, now to fear,
now to a desire for power, but rather that one is using
one or another of a series of potent practices to prevent
a mysterious and widespread psychological phenome-
non from arising. Once this attitude has appeared, a
Samoan habitually gives up the struggle without more

[122]

i^^j:r.*'i.

i

A sfirii of the zvood

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY

detailed inquiry and with a minimum of complaint.
This fatalistic acceptance of an inexplicable attitude
makes for an odd incuriousness about motives. The
Samoans are not in the least insensitive to differences
between people. But their full appreciation of these
differences is blurred by their conception of an obstinate
disposition, a tendency to take umbrage, irascibility,
contra-suggestibility, and particular biases as just so
many roads to one attitude — musu.

This lack of curiosity about motivation is furthered
by the conventional acceptance of a completely ambigu-
ous answer to any personal question. The most charac-
teristic reply to any question about one's motivation is
Ta iloy "search me," sometimes made more specific by
the addition of "I don't know." * This is considered to
be an adequate and acceptable answer in ordinary con-
versation although its slight curtness bars it out from
ceremonious occasions. So deep seated is the habit of
using this disclaimer that I had to put a taboo upon its
use by the children in order to get the simplest question
answered directly. When this ambiguous rejoinder is
combined with a statement that one is musu, the result
is the final unrevealing statement, "Search me, why, I
don't want to, that's all." Plans will be abandoned,
children refuse to live at home, marriages broken off.
Village gossip is interested in the fart but shrugs its
shoulders before the motives^

There is one curious exception to this attitude. If

♦See Appendix I, page 253.

[123]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

an Individual falls ill, the explanation is sought first
in the attitudes of his relatives. Anger in the heart of a
relative, especially in that of a sister^ Is most potent in
producing evil and so the whole household is convened,
a kava ceremony held and each relative solemnly en-
joined to confess what anger there is in his heart against
the sick person. Such injunctions are met either by
solemn disclaimers or by detailed confessions: "Last
week my brother came into the house and ate all the
food, and I was angry all day"j or "My brother and I
had a quarrel and my father took my brother's side and
I was angry at my father for his favouritism towards
my brother." But this special ceremony only serves to
throw into strong relief the prevalent unspeculative
attitude towards motivation. I once saw a girl leave a
week-end fishing party immediately upon arrival at our
destination and insist upon returning in the heat of the
day the six miles to the village. But her companions
ventured no hypothesis j she was simply 'musu to the
party.

How great a protection for the Individual such an
attitude is will readily be seen when it is remembered
how little privacy any one has. Chief or child, he
dwells habitually in a house with at least half a dozen
other people. His possessions are simply rolled in a
mat, placed on the rafters or piled carelessly into a
basket or a chest. A chief's personal property is likely
to be respected, at least by the women of the house-
hold, but no one else can be sure from hour to hour of

[124]

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY

his nominal possessions. The tapa which a woman
spent three weeks in making will be given away to a
visitor during her temporary absence. The rings may
be begged off her fingers at any moment. Privacy of
possessions is virtually impossible. In the same way,
all of an individual's acts are public property. An
occasional love affair may slip through the fingers of
gossip, and an occasional moetotolo go uncaught, but
there is a very general cognisance on the part of the
whole village of the activity of every single inhabitant.
I shall never forget the outraged expression with which
an informant told me that nobody, actually nobody at
all, knew who was the father of Fa'amoana's baby.
The oppressive atmosphere of the small town is all
about them J in an hour children will have made a
dancing song of their most secret acts. This glaring
publicity is compensated for by a violent gloomy secre-
tiveness. Where a Westerner would say, "Yes, I love
him but you'll never know how far it went," a Samoan
would say, "Yes, of course I lived with him, but you'll
never know whether I love him or hate him."

The Samoan language has no regular comparative.
There are several clumsy ways of expressing compari-
son by using contrast, "This is good and that is bad"j
or by the locution, "And next to him there comes, etc."
Comparisons are not habitual although in the rigid
social structure of the community, relative rank is very
keenly recognised. But relative goodness, relative
beauty, relative wisdom are unfamiliar formalisations

[125]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

to them. I tried over and over again to get judgments
as to who was the wisest or the best man of the com-
munity. An informant's first impulse was always to
answer: "Oh, they are all good"j or, "There are so
many wise ones." Curiously enough, there seemed to
be less difficulty in distinguishing the vicious than the
virtuous. This is probably due to the Missionary in-
fluence which if it has failed to give the native a con-
viction of Sin, has at least provided him with a list of
sins. Although I often met with a preliminary re-
sponse, "There are so many bad boys"j it was usually
qualified spontaneously by "But so-and-so is the worst
because he . . ." Ugliness and viciousness were more
vivid and unusual attributes of personality; beauty, wis-
dom, and kindness were taken for granted.

In an account given of another person the sequence
of traits mentioned followed a set and objective pattern:
sex, age, rank, relationship, defects, activities. Sponta-
neous comment upon character or personality were un-
usual. So a girl describes her grandmother: "Lauuli?
Oh, she is an old woman, very old, she's my father's
mother. She's a widow with one eye. She is too old
to go inland but sits in the house all day. She makes
tapa." * This completely unanalytical account is only
modified in the case of exceptionally in^.elligent adults-
who are asked to make judgments.

In the native classification attitudes are qualified by
four terms, good and bad, easy and difficult, paired. A

* For additional character sketches see Appendix I, page 253.

[126]

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY

good child will be said to listen easily or to act well, a
bad child to listen with difficulty or act badly. "Easy"
and "with difficulty" are judgments of character j
"good" and "bad" of behaviour. So that good or bad
behaviour have become, explained in terms of ease or
difficulty, to be regarded as an inherent capability of the
individual. As we would say a person sang easily or
swam without effort, the Samoan will say one obeys
easily, acts respectfully, "easily," reserving the terms
"good" or "well" for objective approbation. So a
chief who was commenting on the bad behaviour of
his brother's daughter remarked, "But Tui's children
always did listen with difficulty," with as casual an
acceptance of an irradicable defect as if he had said,
"But John always did have poor eye sight."

Such an attitude towards conduct is paralleled by an
equally unusual attitude towards the expression of emo-
tion. The expressions of emotions are classified as
"caused" and "uncaused." The emotional, easily up-
set, m.oody person is described as laughing without
cause, crying without cause, showing anger or pugna-
ciousness without cause. The expression "to be very
angry without cause" does not carry the implication of
quick temper, which is expressed by the word "to anger
easily," nor the connotation of a disproportionate re-
sponse to a legitimate stimulus, but means literally to
be angry without cause, or freely, an emotional state
without any apparent stimulus whatsoever. Such judg-
ments are the nearest that the Samoan approaches to
,... [127]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

evaluation of temperament as opposed to character.
The well-integrated individual who approximates
closely to the attitudes of his age and sex group is not
accused of laughing, crying, or showing anger without
cause. Without inquiry it is assumed that he has good
typical reasons for a behaviour which would be scruti-
nised and scorned in the case of the temperamental
deviant. And always excessive emotion, violent pref-
erences, strong allegiances are disallowed. The Samoan
preference is for a middle course, a moderate amount o±
feeling, a discreet expression of a reasonable and bal-
anced attitude. Those who care greatly are always
said to care without cause.

The one most disliked trait in a contemporary is ex-
pressed by the term fiasili, literally "desiring to be
highest," more idiomatically, "stuck up." This is the
comment of the age mate where an older person would
use the disapproving tautala laititiy "presuming above
one's age." It is essentially the resentful comment of
those who are ignored, neglected, left behind upon those
who excel them, scorn them, pass them by. As a term
of reproach it is neither as dreaded nor as resented as
the tautala laititl because envy is felt to play a part
in the taunt.

In the casual conversations, the place of idle specula-
tion about motivation is taken by explanations in terms
of physical defect or objective misfortune, thus "Sila
is crying over in that house. Well, Sila is deaf."
"Tulipa is angry at her brother. Tulipa's mother went

[128]

THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY

to Tutuila last week." Although these statements have
the earmarks of attempted explanations they are really
onl^_conversational habits._._The physical defect or
recent incident, is not specifically invoked but merely
mentioned with slightly greater and more deprecatory
emphasis. The whole preoccupation is with the in-
dividual as an actor, and the motivations peculiar to his
psychology are left an unplumbed mystery.

Judgments are always made in terms of age groups,
from the standpoints of the group of the speaker and
the age of the person judged. A young boy will not
be regarded as an intelligent or stupid, attractive or un-
attractive, clumsy or skilful person. He is a bright
little boy of nine who runs errands efficiently and is
wise enough to hold his tongue when his elders are
present, or a promising youth of eighteen who can
make excellent speeches in the Aumagay lead a fishing
expedition with discretion and treat the chiefs with the
respect which is due to them, or a wise matai, whose
words are few and well chosen and who is good at weav-
ing eel traps. The virtues of the child are not the
virtues of the adult. And the judgment of the speaker
is similarly influenced by age, so that the relative esti-
mation of character varies also. Pre-adolescent boys
and girls will vote that boy and girl worst who are most
pugnacious, irascible, contentious, rowdy. Young peo-
ple from sixteen to twenty shift their censure from
the rowdy and bully to the licentious, the moetotolo
among the boys, the notoriously promiscuous among the

[129]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

girls j while adults pay very little attention to sex of-
fenders and stress instead the inept, the impudent and
the disobedient among the young, and the lazy, the
stupid, the quarrelsome and the unreliable as the least
desirable characters among the adults. When an adult
is speaking the standards of conduct are graded in this
fashion: small children should keep quiet, wake up
early, obey, work hard and cheerfully, play with chil-
dren of their own sexj young people should work in-
dustriously and skilfully, not be presuming, marry dis-
creetly, be loyal to their relatives, not carry tales, nor
be trouble makers j while adults should be wise, peace-
able, serene, generous, anxious for the good prestige of
their village and conduct their lives with all good form
and decorum. No prominence is given to the subtler
facts of intelligence and temperament. Preference be-
tween the sexes is given not to the arrogant, the flippant,
the courageous, but to the quiet, the demure boy or girl
who "speaks softly and treads lightly."

[130]

X

THE EXPERIENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY OF THE AVERAGE

GIRL *

WITH a background of knowledge about Samoan cus-
tom, of the way in which a ch'ld is educated, of the
claims which the community makes upon children and
young people, of the attitude towards sex and per-
sonality, we come to the tale of the group of girls with
whom I spent many months, the group of girls between
ten and twenty years of age who lived in the three little
villages on the lee side of the island of Tau. In their
lives as a group, in their responses as individuals, lies
the answer to the question: What is coming of age like
in Samoa?

The reader will remember that the principal activity
of the little girls was baby-tending. They could also
do reef fishing, weave a ball and make a pin-wheel,
climb a cocoanut tree, keep themselves afloat in a swim-
ming hole which changed its level fifteen feet with
every wave, grate off the skin of a breadfruit or taro,
sweep the sanded yard of the house, carry water from
the sea, do simple washing and dance a somewhat indi-
vidualised siva. Their knowledge of the biology of

* See Tables and Summaries in Appendix IV.

[131]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

life and death was overdeveloped in proportion to
their knowledge of the organisation of their society or
any of the niceties of conduct prescribed for their elders.
They were in a position which would be paralleled in
our culture if a child had seen birth and death before
she was taught not to pass a knife blade first or how to
make change for a quarter. None of these children
could speak the courtesy language, even in its most ele-
mentary forms, their knowledge being confined to four
or five words of invitation and acceptance. This
ignorance effectually barred them from the conversa-
tions of their elders upon all ceremonial occasions.
Spying upon a gathering of chiefs would have been an
unrewarding experience. They knew nothing of the
social organisation of the village beyond knowing which
adults were heads of families and which adult men and
women were married. They used the relationship
terms loosely and without any real understanding, often
substituting the term, "sibling of my own sex," where
a sibling of opposite sex was meant, and when they
applied the term "brother" to a young uncle, they did
so without the clarity of their elders who, while using
the term in an age-grouping sense, realised perfectly
that the "brother" was really a mother's or father's
brother. In their use of language their immaturity was
chiefly evidenced by a lack of familiarity with the
courtesy language, and by much confusion in the use of
the dual and of the inclusive and exclusive pronouns.
These present about the same difficulty in their lan-

[132]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

guage as the use of a nominative after the verb "to be"
in English. They had also not acquired a mastery of
the processes for manipulating the vocabulary by the
use of very freely combining prefixes and suffixes. A
child will use the term fa'a Samoay "in Samoan fash-
ion," or fa'atamay tomboy, but fail to use the con-
venient fa'a in making a new and less stereotyped com-
parison, using instead some less convenient linguistic
circumlocution.*

All of these children had seen birth and death. They
had seen many dead bodies. They had watched miscar-
riage and peeked under the arms of the old women who
were washing and commenting upon the undeveloped
foetus. There was no convention of sending children
of the family away at such times, although the hordes
of neighbouring children were scattered with a shower
of stones if any of the older women could take time
from the more absorbing events to hurl them. But the
feeling here was that children were noisy and trouble-
some j there was no desire to protect them from shock
or to keep them in ignorance. About half of the chil-
dren had seen a partly developed foetus, which the
Samoans fear will otherwise be born as an avenging
ghost, cut from a woman's dead body in the open
grave. If shock is the result of early experiences with
birth, death, or sex activities, it should surely be mani-
fest here in this postmortem Csesarian where grief for
the dead, fear of death, a sense of horror and a dread of

*See Appendix I, page 256.

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

contamination from contact with the dead, the open,
unconcealed operation and the sight of the distorted,
repulsive foetus all combine to render the experience
indelible. An only slightly less emotionally charged
experience was the often witnessed operation of cut-
ting open any dead body to search out the cause of
death. These operations performed in the shallow
open grave, beneath a glaring noon-day sun, with a
frighted, excited crowd watching in horrified fascina-
tion, are hardly orderly or unemotional initiations into
the details of biology and death, and yet they seem to
leave no bad effects on the children's emotional make-
up. Possibly the adult attitude that these are horrible
but perfectly natural, non-unique occurrences, forming
a legitimate part of the child's experience, may suffi-
ciently account for the lack of bad results. Children
take an intense interest in life and death, and are more
proportionately obsessed by it than are their adults who
divide their horror between the death of a young neigh-
bour in child-bed and the fact that the high chief has
been insulted by some breach of etiquette in the neigh-
bouring village. The intricacies of the social life are a
closed book to the child and a correspondingly fascinat-
ing field of exploration in later life, while the facts of
life and death are shorn of all mystery at an early age.
In matters of sex the ten-year-olds are equally
sophisticated, although they witness sex activities only
surreptitiously, since all expressions of affection are
rigorously barred in public. A couple whose wedding

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

night may have been spent in a room with ten other
people will never the less shrink in shame from even
touching hands in public. Individuals between whom
there have been sex relations are said to be "shy of
each other," and manifest this shyness in different
fashion but with almost the same intensity as in the
brother and sister avoidance. Husbands and wives
never walk side by side through the village, for the
husband, particularly, would be "ashamed." So no
Samoan child is accustomed to seeing father and mother
exchange casual caresses. The customary salutation by
rubbing noses is, of course, as highly conventionalised
and impersonal as our handshake. The only sort of
demonstration which ever occurs in public is of the
horseplay variety between young people whose affec-
tions are not really involved. This romping is par-
ticularly prevalent in groups of women, often taking
the form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.

But the lack of privacy within the houses where
mosquito netting marks off purely formal walls about
the married couples, and the custom of young lovers
of using the palm groves for their rendezvous, makes
it inevitable that children should see intercourse, often
and between many different people. In many cases
they have not seen first intercourse, which is usually
accompanied by greater shyness and precaution. With
the passing of the public ceremony, defloration forms
one of the few mysteries in a young Samoan's knowl-
edge of life. But scouring the village palm groves in

[135]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

search of lovers is one of the recognised forms of
amusement for the ten-year-olds.

Samoan children have complete knowledge of the
human body and its functions, owing to the custom of
little children going unclothed, the scant clothing of
adults, the habit of bathing in the sea, the use of the
beach as a latrine and the lack of privacy in sexual life.
They also have a vivid understanding of the nature of
sex. Masturbation is an all but universal habit, be-
ginning at the age of six or seven. There were only
three little girls in my group who did not masturbate.
Theoretically it is discontinued with the beginning of
heterosexual activity and only resumed again in periods
of enforced continence. Among grown boys and girls
[casual homosexual practices also supplant it to a certain
lextent. Boys masturbati&Jii^groups but among little
girls it is a more individualistic, secretive practice. This
habit seems never to be a matter of individual discovery,
one child always learning from another. The adult ban
only covers the unseemliness of open indulgence.

The adult attitude towards all the details of sex is
characterised by this view that they are unseemly, not
that they are wrong. Thus a youth would think noth-
ing of shouting the length of the village, "Ho, maiden,
wait for me in your bed to-night," but public comment
upon the details of sex or of evacuation were considered
to be in bad taste. All the words which are thus ban-
ished from polite conversation are cherished by the
children who roll the salacious morsels under their

[136]

I I

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

tongues with great relish. The children of seven and
eight get as much illicit satisfaction out of the other
functions of the body as out of sex. This is interesting
in view of the different attitude in Samoa towards the
normal processes of evacuation. There is no privacy
and no sense of shame. Nevertheless the brand of bad
taste seems to be as effective in interesting the young
children as is the brand of indecency among us. It is
also curious that in theory and in fact boys and men take
a more active interest in the salacious than do the
women and girls.

It seems difficult to account for a salacious attitude
among a people where so little is mysterious, so little
forbidden. The precepts of the missionaries may have
modified the native attitude more than the native prac-
tice. And the adult attitude towards children as non-
participants may also be an important causal factor.
For this seems to be the more correct view of any pro-
hibitions which govern children. There is little evi-
dence of a desire to preserve a child's innocence or to
protect it from witnessing behaviour, the following of
which would constitute the heinous offence, tautala
laltut ("presuming above one's age"). For while a pair
of lovers would never indulge in any demonstration
before any one, child or adult, who was merely a specta-
tor, three or four pairs of lovers who are relatives or
friends often choose a common rendezvous. (This, of
course, excludes relatives of opposite sex, included in
the brother and sister avoidance, although married

[137]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

brothers and sisters might live in the same house after
marriage.) From the night dances, now discontinued
under missionary influence, which usually ended in a
riot of open promiscuity, children and old people were
excluded, as non-participants whose presence as unin-
volved spectators would have been indecent. This
attitude towards non-participants characterised all emo-
tionally charged events, a women's weaving bee which
was of a formal, ceremonial nature, a house-building,
a candle-nut burning — these were activities at which the
presence of a spectator would have been unseemly.

Yet, coupled with the sophistication of the children
went no pre-adolescent heterosexual experimentation
and very little homosexual activity which was regarded
in native theory as imitative of and substitutive for
heterosexual. The lack of precocious sex experimenta-
tion is probably due less to the parental ban on such
precocity than to the strong institutionalised antagonism
between younger boys and younger girls and the taboo
against any amiable intercourse between them. This
rigid sex dichotomy may also be operative in determin-
ing the lack of specialisation of sex feeling in adults.
Since there is a heavily charged avoidance feeling to-
wards brother and cousins, and a tendency to lump all
other males together as the enemy who will some day
be one's lovers, there are no males in a girPs age group
whom she ever regards simply as individuals without
relation to sex.

Such then was the experience of the twenty-eight

[138]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

little girls in the three villages. In temperament and
character they varied enormously. There was Tita,
who at nine acted like a child of seven, was still prin-
cipally preoccupied with food, completely irresponsible
as to messages and commissions, satisfied to point a
proud fat finger at her father who was town crier.
Only a year her senior was Pele, the precocious little
sister of the loosest woman in the village. Pele spent
most of her time caring for her sister's baby which, she
delighted in telling you, was of disputed parentage.
Her dancing in imitation of her sister's was daring and
obscene. Yet, despite the burden of the heavy ailing
baby which she carried always on her hip and the sor-
didness of her home where her fifty-year-old mother
still took occasional lovers and her weak-kneed insignifi-
cant father lived a hen-pecked ignominious existence,
Pele's attitude towards life was essentially gay and
sane. Better than suggestive dancing she liked hunt-
ing for rare samoana shells along the beach or diving
feet first into the swimming hole or hunting for land
crabs in the moonlight. Fortunately for her, she lived
in the centre of the Luma gang. In a more isolated
spot her unwholesome home and natural precocity
might have developed very differently. As it was,
she differed far less from the other children in her
group than her family, the most notorious in the village,
differed from the families of her companions. In a
Samoan village the influence of the home environment
is being continually offset in the next generation by

[139]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

group activities through which the normal group
standards assert themselves. This was universally true
for the boys for whom the many years' apprenticeship
in the Aumaga formed an excellent school for dis-
ciplining individual peculiarities. In the case of the
girls this function was formerly performed in part by
the Aualumay but, as I pointed out in the chapter on
the girl and her age group, the little girl is much more
dependent upon her neighbourhood than is the boy.
As an adult she is also more dependent upon her rela-
tionship group.

Tuna, who lived next door to Pele, was in a different
plight, the unwilling little victim of the great Samoan
sin of tautala laUit't. Her sister Lila had eloped at
fifteen with a seventeen-year-old boy. A pair of hot-
headed children, they had never thoroughly re-estab-
lished themselves with the community, although their
families had relented and solemnised the marriage with
an appropriate exchange of property. Lila still smarted
under the public disapproval of her precocity and
lavished a disproportionate amount of affection upon
her obstreperous baby whose incessant crying was the
bane of the neighbourhood. After spoiling him be-
yond endurance, she would hand him over to Tuna.
Tuna, a stocky little creature with a large head and
enormous melting eyes, looked at life from a slightly
oblique angle. She was a little more calculating than
the other children, a little more watchful for returns,
less given to gratuitous outlays of personal service.

[140]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

Her sister's overindulgence of the baby made Tuna's
task much harder than those of her companions. But
she reaped her reward in the slightly extra gentleness
with which they treated their most burdened associate,
and here again the group saved her from a pronounced
temperamental response to the exigencies of her home
life.

A little further away lived Fitu and Ula, Maliu and
Pola, two pairs of sisters. Fitu and Maliu, girls of
about thirteen, were just withdrawing from the gang,
turning their younger brothers and sisters over to Ula
and Pola, and beginning to take a more active part in
the affairs of their households, Ula was alert, pretty,
pampered. Her household might in all fairness be
compared to oursj it consisted of her mother, her father,
two sisters and two brothers. True, her uncle who lived
next door was the inatai of the household, but still this
little biological family had a strong separate existence
of its own and the children showed the results of it.
Lalala, the mother, was an intelligent and still beauti-
ful woman, even after bearing six children in close
succession. She came from a family of high rank, and
because she had had no brothers, her father had taught
her much of the genealogical material usually taught
to the favourite son. Her knowledge of the social
structure of the community and of the minutlas of the
ceremonies which had formerly surrounded the court
of the king of Manu'a was as full as that of any middle-
aged man in the community. She was skilled in the

[141]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

handicrafts and her brain was full of new designs and
unusual applications of material. She knew several
potent medical remedies and had many patients. Mar-
ried at fifteen, while still a virgin, her marital life,
which had begun with the cruel public defloration cere-
mony, had been her only sex experience. She adored
her husband, whose poverty was due to his having come
from another island and not to laziness or inability.
Lalala made her choices in life with a full recognition
of the facts of her existence. There was too much for
her to do. She had no younger sisters to bear the brunt
of baby-tending for her. There were no youths to help
her husband in the plantations. Well and good, she
would not wrestle with the inevitable. And so Lalala's
house was badly kept. Her children were dirty and
bedraggled. But her easy good nature did not fail her
as she tried to weave a fine mat on some blazing after-
noon, while the baby played with the brittle easily
broken pandanus strands, and doubled her work. But
all of this reacted upon Fitu, lanky, ill-favoured execu-
tive little creature that she was. Fitu combined a
passionate devotion to her mother with an obsessive
solicitude for her younger brothers and sisters. To-
wards Ula alone her attitude was mixed. Ula, fifteen
months younger, was pretty, lithe, flexible and indolent.
While Fitu was often teased by her mother and re-
buked by her companions for being like a boy, Ula was
excessively feminine. She worked as hard as any other

[142]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

child of her age, but Fitu felt that their mother and
their home were unusual and demanded more than the
average service and devotion. She and her mother
were like a pair of comrades, and Fitu bossed and joked
with her mother in a fashion shocking to all Samoan
onlookers. If Fitu was away at night, her mother went
herself to look for her, instead of sending another child.
Fitu was the eldest daughter, with a precocity bred of
responsibility and an efficiency which was the direct out-
come of her mother's laissez-faire attitude. Ula
showed equally clearly the effect of being the prettier
younger sister, trading upon her superior attractiveness
and more meagre sense of duty. These children, as
did the children in all three of the biological families
in the three villages, showed more character, more
sharply defined personality, greater precocity and a
more personal, more highly charged attitude toward*;
their parents.

It would be easy to lay too much stress on the dif-
ferences between children in large households and chil-
dren in small ones. There were, of course, too few
cases to draw any final conclusions. But the small fam-
ily in Samoa did demand from the child the very quali-
ties which were frowned upon in Samoan society, based
upon the ideal of great households in which there were
many youthful labourers who knew their place. And
in these small families where responsibility and initia-
tive were necessary, the children seemed to develop

[143]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

them much earlier than in the more usual home envi-
ronment in which any display of such qualities was
sternly frowned upon.

This was the case with Malui and Meta, Ipu and Vi,
Mata, Tino and Lama, little girls just approaching
puberty who lived in large heterogeneous households.
They were giving over baby-tending for more produc-
tive work. They were reluctantly acquiring some of
the rudiments of etiquette j they were slowly breaking
their play affiliations with the younger children. But
all of this was an enforced change of habits rather than
any change in attitude. They were conscious of their
new position as almost grown girls who could be trusted
to go fishing or work on the plantations. Under their
short dresses they again wore lavalavas which they had
almost forgotten how to keep fastened. These dragged
about their legs and cramped their movements and fell
oif if they broke into a sprint. Most of all they missed
the gang life and eyed a little wistfully the activities of
their younger relatives. Their large impersonal house-
holds provided them with no personal drives, invested
them with no intriguing responsibilities. They were
simply little girls who were robust enough to do heavy
work and old enough to learn to do skilled work, and
so had less time for play.

In general attitude, they differed not at all from
Tolo, from Tulipa, from Lua, or Lata, whose first
menstruation was a few months past. No ceremony
had marked the difference between the two groups. No

[144]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

social attitude testified to a crisis past. They were told
not to make kava while menstruating, but the participa-
tion in a restriction they'd known about all their lives
was unimpressive. Some of them had made kava be-
fore puberty, others had not. It depended entirely
upon whether there was an available girl or boy about
when a chief wished to have some kava made. In more
rigorous days a girl could not make kava nor marry
until she menstruated. But the former restriction had
yielded to the requirements of expediency. The
menstruating girl experienced very little pain which
might have served to stress for her her new maturity.
All of the girls reported back or abdominal pains which,
however, were so slight that they seldom interfered in
any way with their usual activities. In the table I have
counted it unusual pain whenever a girl was incapaci-
tated for work, but these cases were in no sense com-
parable to severe cases of menstrual cramps in our
civilisation. They were unaccompanied by dizziness,
fainting spells, or pain sufficient to call forth groaning
or writhing. The idea of such pain struck all Samoan
women as bizarre and humorous when it was described
to them. And no special solicitude for her health,
mental or physical, was shown to the menstruating girl.
From foreign medical advice they had learned that
bathing during menstruation was bad, and a mother
occasionally cautioned her daughter not to bathe.
There was no sense of shame connected with puberty
nor any need of concealment. Pre-adolescent children

[145]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

took the news that a girl had reached puberty, a woman
had had a baby, a boat had come from Ofu, or a pig
had been killed by a falling boulder with the same in-
souciance — all bits of diverting gossip j and any girl
could give accurate testimony as to the development of
any other girl in her neighbourhood or relationship
groups. Nor was puberty the immediate forerunner of
sex experience. Perhaps a year, two or even three
years would pass before a girPs shyness would relax, or
her figure appeal to the roving eye of some older boy.
To be a virgin's first lover was considered the high
point of pleasure and amorous virtuosity, so that a
girPs first lover was usually not a boy of her own age,
equally shy and inexperienced. The girls in this group
were divided into little girls like Lua, and gawky over-
grown Tolo, who said frankly that they did not want
to go walking with boys, and girls like Pala, who while
still virgins, were a little weary of their status and
eager for amorous experience. That they remained in
this passive untouched state so long was mainly due to
the conventions of love-making, for while a youth liked
to woo a virgin, he feared ridicule as a cradle-snatcher,
while the girls also feared the dreaded accusation of
tautala laititi ("presuming above one's age"). The
forays of more seasoned middle-aged marauders
among these very young girls were frowned upon, and
so the adolescent girls were given a valuable interval
in which to get accustomed to new work, greater isola-
tion and an unfamiliar physical development.

[146]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

The next older girls were definitely divided as to
whether or not they lived in the pastor's households.
A glance at the table in the appendix will show that
among the girls a couple of years past puberty, there is
a definite inverse correlation between residence at home
and chastity, with only one exception, Ela, who had
been forgiven and taken back into the household of a
pastor where workers were short. Ela's best friend
was her cousin, Talo, the only girl in the group who
had sex experience before menstruation had begun.
But Talo was clearly a case of delayed menstruation 3
all the other signs of puberty were present. Her aunt
shrugged her shoulders in the face of Talo's obvious
sophistication and winning charm and made no attempt
to control her. The friendship between these two
girls was one of the really important friendships in the
whole group. Both girls definitely proclaimed their
preference, and their homosexual practices were un-
doubtedly instrumental in producing Talo's precocity
and solacing Ela for the stricter regime of the pastor's
household.

These casual homosexual relations between girls
never assumed any long-time importance. On the part
of growing girls or women who were working together
they were regarded as a pleasant and natural diversion,
just tinged with the salacious. "Where heterosexual
relationships were so casual, so shallowly channelled,
there was no pattern into which homosexual relation-
ships could fall. Native theory and vocabulary recog-

[147]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

nised the real pervert who was incapable of normal
heterosexual response, and the very small population is
probably sufficient explanation for the rarity of these
types. I saw only one, Sasi, a boy of twenty who was
studying for the ministry. He was slightly but not
pronouncedly feminine in appearance, was skilled at
women's work and his homosexual drive was strong
enough to goad him into making continual advances to
other boys. He spent more time casually in the com-
pany of girls, maintained a more easy-going friendship
with them than any other boy on the island. Sasi had
proposed marriage to a girl in a pastor's household in a
distant village and been refused, but as there was a
rule that divinity students must marry before ordina-
tion, this has little significance. I could find no evi-
dence that he had ever had heterosexual relations and
the girls' casual attitude towards him was significant.
They regarded him as an amusing freak while the men
to whom he had made advances looked upon him with
mingled annoyance and contempt. There were no
girls who presented such a clear picture although three
/ of the deviants discussed in the next chapter were
clearly mixed types, without, however, showing con-
vincing evidence of genuine perversion.

The general preoccupation with sex, the attitude that

(minor sex activities, suggestive dancing, stimulating
salacious conversation, salacious songs and definitely
motivated tussling are all acceptable and attractive di-
versions, is mainly responsible for the native attitude

[148]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

towards homosexual practices. They are simply flay^
neither frowned upon nor given much consideration.
As heterosexual relations are given significance not by
love and a tremendous fixation upon one individual,
the only forces which can make a homosexual relation-
ship lasting and important, but by children and the
place of marriage in the economic and social structure
of the village, it is easy to understand why very preva-
lent homosexual practices have no more important or
striking results. The recognition and use in hetero-
sexual relations of all the secondary variations of sex
activity which loom as primary in homosexual relations
are instrumental also in minimising their importance.
The effects of chance childhood perversions, the fixa-
tion of attention on unusual erogenous zones with con-
sequent transfer of sensitivity from the more normal
centres, the absence of a definite and accomplished spe-
cialisation of erogenous zones — all the accidents of
emotional development which in a civilisation, recog-
nising only one narrow form of sex activity, result
in unsatisfactory marriages, casual homosexuality and
prostitution, are here rendered harmless. The Samoan
puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and
believes that women need more initiating, more time
for the maturing of sex feeling. A man who fails to
satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blun-
derer, a fit object for village ridicule and contempt.
The women in turn are conscious that their lovers use
a definite technique which they regard with a sort of

[149]

/

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

fatalism as if all men had a set of slightly magical,
wholly irresistible, tricks up their sleeves. But ama-
tory lore is passed down from one man to another and
is looked upon much more self-consciously and ana-
lytically by men than by women. Parents are shy of
going beyond the bounds of casual conversation (natu-
rally these are much wider than in our civilisation) in
the discussion of sex with their children, so that defi-
nite instruction passes from the man of twenty-five to
the boy of eighteen rather than from father to son.
The girls learn from the boys and do very little con-
fiding in each other. All of a man's associates will
know every detail of some unusual sex experience while
the girl involved will hardly have confided the bare
outlines to any one. Her lack of any confidants except
relatives towards whom there is always a slight barrier
of reserve (I have seen a girl shudder away from act-
ing as an ambassador to her sister) may partly account
for this.

The fact that educating one sex in detail and merely
fortifying the other sex with enough knowledge and
familiarity with sex to prevent shock produces normal
sex adjustments is due to the free experimentation
which is permitted and the rarity with which both
lovers are amateurs. I knew of only one such case,
where two children, a sixteen-year-old boy and a
fifteen-year-old girl, both in boarding schools on an-
other island, ran away together. Through inexperi-
ence they bungled badly. They were both expelled

[.50]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL ,^c ,. .

from school, and the boy is now a man of twenty-four crif<.
with high intelligence and real .charm, but a notorious
moetotoloy execrated by every girl in his village. Fa-
miliarity with sex, and t he recognition of a ne ed of a
techniqueto dea l with sex as an art, hav e produced a
sche me of personal r elations in which there are no neu-
rotic pictures, no frigidity^ no impotence, excep t as the
temporary result of severe illness, and the capacityTor
intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility.
Of the twenty-five girls past puberty, eleven had had
heterosexual experience. Fala, Tolu, and Namu were
three cousins who were popular with the youths of
their own village and also with visitors from distant
Fitiuta. The women of Fala's family were of easy
virtue; Tolu's father was dead and she lived with her
blind mother in the home of Namu's parents, who,
burdened with six children under twelve years of age,
were not going to risk losing two efficient workers by
too close supervision. The three girls made common
rendezvous with their lovers and their liaisons were
frequent and gay. Tolu, the eldest, was a little weary
after three years of casual adventures and professed
herself willing to marry. She later moved into the
household of an important chief in order to improve
her chances of meeting strange youths who might be
interested In matrimony. Namu was genuinely taken
with a boy from Fitiuta whom she met in secret while
a boy of her own village whom her parents favoured
courted her openly. Occasional assignations with other

[151]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

boys of her own village relieved the monotony of life
between visits from her preferred lover. Fala, the
youngest, was content to let matters drift. Her lovers
were friends and relatives of the lovers of her cousins
and she was still sufficiently childlike and uninvolved
to get almost as much enjoyment out of her cousins'
love affairs as out of her own. All three of these girls
worked hard, doing the full quota of work for an
adult. All day they fished, washed, worked on the
plantation, wove mats and blinds. Tolu was exception-
ally clever at weaving. They were valuable economic
assets to their families} they would be valuable to the
husbands whom their families were not over anxious to
find for them.

In the next village lived Luna, a lazy good-natured
girl, three years past puberty. Her mother was dead.
Her father had married again, but the second wife had
gone back to her own people. Luna lived for several
years in the pastor's household and had gone home
when her stepmother left her father. Her father was
a very old chief, tremendously preoccupied with his
prestige and reputation in the village. He held an
important title j he was a master craftsman} he was the
best versed man in the village in ancient lore and de-
tails of ceremonial procedure. His daughter was a
devoted and efficient attendant. It was enough. Luna
tired of the younger girls who had been her compan-
ions in the pastor's household and sought instead two
young married women among her relatives. One of

[152]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

these, a girl who had deserted her husband and was
living with a temporary successor came to live in Luna's
household. She and Luna were constant companions,
and Luna, quite easily and inevitably took one lover,
then two, then a third — all casual affairs. She dressed
younger than her years, emphasised that she was still
a girl. Some day she would marry and be a church
member, but now: Laititi a^u ("I am but young").
And who was she to give up dancing.

Her cousin Lotu was a church member, and had at-
tended the missionary boarding school. She had had
only one accepted lover, the illegitimate son of a chief
who dared not jeopardise his very slender chance of
succeeding to his father's title by marrying her. She
was the eldest of nine children, living in the third
strictly biological family in the village. She showed
the effects of greater responsibility at home by a quiet
maturity and decision of manner, of her school train-
ing in a greater neatness of person and regard for the
nicety of detail. Although she was transgressing, the
older church members charitably closed their eyes, sym-
pathising with her lover's family dilemma. Her only
other sex experience had been with a moetotoloy a rela-
tive. Should her long fidelity to her lover lead to
pregnancy, she would probably bear the child. (When
a Samoan woman does wish to avoid giving birth to a
child, exceedingly violent massage and the chewing of
kava is resorted to, but this is only in very exceptional
cases, as even illegitimate children are enthusiastically

[■53]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

welcomed.) Lotu's attitudes were more considered,
more sophisticated than those o£ the other girls of her
age. Had it not been for the precarious social status
of her lover, she would probably have been married
already. As it was, she laboured over the care of her
younger brothers and sisters, and followed the routine
of relationship duties incumbent upon a young girl in
the largest family on the island. She reconciled her
church membership and her deviation from chastity by
the tranquil reflection that she would have married
had it been possible, and her sin rested lightly upon
her.

In the household of one high chief lived the Samoan
version of our devoted maiden aunts. She was docile,
efficient, responsible, entirely overshadowed by several
more attractive girls. To her were entrusted the new-
born babies and the most difficult diplomatic errands.
Hard work which she never resented took up all her
time and energy. When she was asked to dance, she
did so negligently. Others dancing so much more bril-
liantly, why make the effort? Hers was the apprecia-
tive worshipping disposition which glowed over Tolu's
beauty or Fala's conquests or Alofi's new baby. She
played the ukulele for others to dance, sewed flower
necklaces for others to wear, planned rendezvous for
others to enjoy, without humiliation or a special air of
martyrdom. She admitted that she had had but one
lover. He had come from far awayj she didn't even
know from what village, and he had never come back.

[154]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

Yes, probably she would marry some day if her chief
so willed it, and was that the baby crying? She was
the stuff of whom devoted aunts are made, depended
upon and loved by all about her. A malaga to another
village might have changed her life, for Samoa boys
sought strange girls merely because they were stran-
gers. But she was always needed at home by some one
and younger girls went journeying in her stead.

Perhaps the most dramatic story was that of Moana,
the last of the group of girls who lived outside the
pastors' households, a vain, sophisticated child, spoiled
by years of trading upon her older half-sister's devo-
tion. Her amours had begun at fifteen and by the time
a year and a half had passed, her parents, fearing that
her conduct was becoming so indiscreet as to seriously
mar her chances of making a good marriage, asked her
uncle to adopt her and attempt to curb her wayward-
ness. This uncle, who was a widower and a sophisti-
cated rake, when he realised the extent of his niece's
experience, availed himself also of her complacency.
This incident, not common in Samoa, because of the
great lack of privacy and isolation, would have passed
undetected in this case, if Moana's older sister, Sila,
had not been in love with the uncle also. This was the
only example of prolonged and intense passion which
I found in the three villages. Samoans rate romantic
fidelity in terms of days or weeks at most, and are in-
clined to scoff at tales of life-long devotion. (They
greeted the story of Romeo and Juliet with incredulous

[155]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

contempt.) But Sila was devoted to Mutu, her step-
father's younger brother, to the point of frenzy. She
had been his mistress and still lived in his household,
but his dilettantism had veered away from her indeco-
rous intensity. When she discovered that he had lived
with her sister, her fury knew no bounds. Masked
under a deep solicitude for the younger girl, whom
she claimed was an innocent untouched child, she de-
nounced Mutu the length of the three villages.
Moana's parents fetched her home again in a great
rage and a family feud resulted. Village feeling ran
high, but opinion was divided as to whether Mutu was
guilty, Moana lying to cover some other peccadillo or
Sila gossiping from spite. The incident was in direct
violation of the brother and sister taboo for Mutu was
young enough for Moana to speak of him as tuagane
(brother). But when two months later, another older
sister died during pregnancy, it was necessary to find
some one stout-hearted enough to perform the neces-
sary Csesarian post-mortem operation. After a violent
family debate, expediency triumphed and Mutu, most
skilled of native surgeons, was summoned to operate
on the dead body of the sister of the girl he had vio-
lated. When he later on announced his intention of
marrying a girl from another island, Sila again dis-
played the most uncontrolled grief and despair, al-
though she herself was carrying on a love affair at the
time.

The lives of the girls who lived in the pastor's

[156]

EXPERIENCE OF THE AVERAGE GIRL

household differed from those of their less restricted
sisters and cousins only in the fact that they had no
love affairs and lived a more regular and ordered exist-
ence. For the excitement of moonlight trysts they
substituted group activities, letting the pleasant friend-
liness of a group of girls fill their lesser leisure. Their
Interest in salacious material was slightly stronger than
the interest of the girls who were free to experiment.
They made real friends outside their relationship
group, trusted other girls more, worked better in a
group, were more at ease with one another but less
conscious of their place in their own households than
were the others.

With the exception of the few cases to be discussed
in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period
of crisis or stress, but was Instead an orderly develop-
ing of a set of slowly maturing Interests and activities.
The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, trou-
bled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote
ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long
as possible and then to marry in one's own village,
near one's own relatives and to have many children,
these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.

[iJ7]

XI

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

WERE there no conflicts, no temperaments which
deviated so markedly from the normal that clash was
inevitable? Was the diffused affection and the dif-
fused authority of the large families, the ease of mov-
ing from one family to another, the knowledge of sex
and'the Treedom'F6~ experiment a sufficient guar antee
td~air^moan girls of a perfect adjustment? In al-
most all cases, yes. But I have reserved for this chap-
ter the tales of the few girls who deviated i n tern pera-
ment or in conduct, altlTough Tn many cases these devi-
ations were~only_chair£ed with posslHilit-ips; nf mnflirtj
and actually had no painful results.

The girl between fourteen and twenty stands at the
centre of household pressure and can expend her irri-
tation at her elders on those over whom she is in a
position of authority. The possibility of escape seems
to temper her restiveness under authority and the irri-
tation of her elders also. When to the fear of a use-
ful worker's running away is added also the fear of a
daughter's indulging in a public elopement, and thus
lowering her marriage value, any marked exercise of
parental authority is considerably mitigated. Violen t^
outbursts of wrath and summary chastisements do occur

[158]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

but consistent and prolonged disciplinary measures are
absent, and a display of temper is likely to be speedily
followed by conciliatory measures. This, of course,
applies only to the relation between a girl and her
elders. Often conflicts of personality between young
people of the same age in a household are not so tem-
pered, but the removal of one party to the conflict, the
individual with the weakest claims upon the household,
is here also the most frequent solution. The fact that
the age-group gang breaks up before adolescence and
is never resumed except in a highly formal manner,
coupled with the decided preference for household
rather than group solidarity, accounts for the scarcity
of conflict here. The child who shuns her age mates
is more available for household work and is never wor-
ried by questions as to why she doesn't run and play
with the other children. On the other hand, the tol-
erance of the children in accepting physical defect or
slight strangeness of temperament prevents any child's
suffering from undeserved ostracism.

The child who is unfavourably located in the vil-
lage is the only real exile. Should the age group last
over eight or ten years of age, the exiles would cer-
tainly suffer or very possibly as they grew bolder, ven-
ture farther from home. But the breakdown of the
gang just as the children are bold enough and free
enough to go ten houses from home, prevents either
of these two results from occurring.

The absence of any important institutionalised rela-

[159]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

tlonship to the community is perhaps the strongest cause
for lack of conflict here. The community makes no
demands upon the young girls except for the occasional
ceremonial service rendered at the meetings of older
women. Were they delinquent in such duties it would
be primarily the concern of their own households
whose prestige would suffer thereby. A boy who re-
fuses to attend the meetings of the Aumaga, or to join
in the communal work, comes in for strong group dis-
approval and hostility, but a girl owes so small a debt
to her community that it does not greatly concern itself
to collect it.

The opportunity to experiment freely, the complete
familiarity with sex and the absence of very violent
preferences make her sex experiences less charged with
possibilities of conflict than they are in a more rigid
and self-conscious civilisation. Cases of passionate
jea lousy do occur but they are matters for ex tended
comment and amazement. During nine months in the
islands only tour cases came to my attention, a girl
who informed against a faithless lover accusing him of
incest, a girl who bit oJ0f part of a rival's ear, a woman
whose husband had deserted her and who fought and
severely injured her successor, and a girl who falsely
accused a rival of stealing. But jealousy is less ex-
pected and less sympathised with than among us, and
consequently there is less of a pattern to which an in-
dividual may respond. Possibly conditions may also
be simplified by the Samoan recognition and toleration

[i6o]

t-

Q-^

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

of vindictive detraction and growling about a rivaL
There are no standards of good form which prescribe
an insincere acceptance of defeat, no insistence on reti-
cence and sportsmanship. So a great deal of slight
irritation can be immediately dissipated. Friendships
are of so casual and shifting a nature that they give
rise to neither jealousy nor conflict. Resentment is
expressed by subdued grumblings and any strong re-
sentment results in the angry one's leaving the house-
hold or sometimes the village.

In the girl's religious life the attitude of the mis-
sionaries was the decisive one. The missionaries require
chastity for church membership and discouraged church
membership before marriage, except for the young
people in the missionary boarding schools who could
be continually supervised. This passive acceptance by
the religious authorities themselves of pre-marital ir-
regularities went a long way towards minimising the
girls' sense of guilt. Continence became not a passport
to heaven but a passport to the missionary schools
which in turn were regarded as a social rather than a
religious adventure. The girl who indulged in sex
experiments was expelled from the local pastor's school,
but it was notable that almost every older girl in the
community, including the most notorious sex offenders,
had been at one time resident in the pastors' house-
holds. The general result of the stricter supervision
provided by these schools seemed to be to postpone the
first sex experience two or three years. The seven girls

[i6i]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

in the household of one native pastor, the three in the
household of the other, were all, although past puberty,
living continent lives, in strong contrast to the habits
of the rest of their age mates.

It might seem that there was fertile material for
conflict between parents who wished their children to
live in the pastor's house and children who did not
wish to do so, and also between children who wished
it and parents who did not.* This conflict was chiefly
reduced by the fact that residence in the pastor's house
actually made very little difference in the child's status
in her own home. She simply carried her roll of mats,
her pillow and her mosquito net from her home to the
pastor's, and the food which she would have eaten at
home was added to the quota of the food which her
family furnished to the pastor. She ate her evening
meal and slept at the pastor's j one or two days a week
she devoted to working for the pastor's family, wash-
ing, weaving, weeding and sweeping the premises. The
rest of her time she spent at home performing the
usual tasks of a girl of her age, so that it was seldom
that a parent objected strongly to sending a child to
the pastor's. It involved no additional expense and
was likely to reduce the chances of his daughter's con-
duct becoming embarrassing, to improve her mastery
of the few foreign techniques, sewing, ironing, em-
broidery, which she could learn from the more skilled
and schooled pastor's wife and thus increase her eco-
nomic value.

*See Appendix, page 257.

[162]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

If, on the other hand, the parents wished their chil-
dren to stay and the children were unwilling to do so,
the remedy was simple. They had but to transgress
seriously the rules of the pastor's household, and they
would be expelled J if they feared to return to their i
parents, there were always other relatives.

So the attitude of the church in respect to chastity
held only the germs of a conflict which was seldom
realised, because of the flexibility with which it adapted
itself to the nearly inevitable. Attendance at the girls'
main boarding school was an attractive prospect. The
fascination of living in a large group of young people
where life was easier and more congenial than at home,
was usually a sufficient bribe to good behaviour, or at
least to discretion. Confession of sin was a rare phe-
nomenon in Samoa. The missionaries had made a rule
that a boy who transgressed the chastity rule would be
held back in his progress through the preparatory
school and seminary for two years after the time his
offence was committed. It had been necessary to change
this ruling to read two years from the detection of the
ojfencey because very often the off^ence was not de-
tected until after the student had been over two years!
in the seminary, and under the old ruling, he would
not have been punished at all. Had the young people
been inspired with a sense of responsibility to a heav-
enly rather than an earthly decree and the boy or girl
been answerable to a recording angel, rather than a
spying neighbour, religion would have provided a real

[163]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

setting for conflict. If such an attitude had been cou-
pled with emphasis upon church membership for the
young and an expectation of religious experience in the
lives of the young, crises in the lives of the young
people would very likely have occurred. As it is, the
whole religious setting is one of formalism, of com-
promise, of acceptance of half measure. The great
number of native pastors with their peculiar interpreta-
tions of Christian teaching have made it impossible to
establish the rigour of western Protestantism with its
inseparable association of sex offences and an individual
consciousness of sin. And the girls upon whom the
religious setting makes no demands, make no demands
upon it. They are content to follow the advice of their
elders to defer church membership until they are older.
Laitki d*u. Fia siva ("For I am young and like to
dance"). The church member is forbidden to dance or
to witness a large night dance. One of the three vil-
lages boasted no girl church members. The second
village had only one, who had, however, long since
transgressed her vows. But as her lover was a youth
whose equivocal position in his family made it impos-
sible to marry, the neighbours did not tattle where
their sympathies were aroused, so Lotu remained tacitly
a church member. In the third village there were two
unmarried girls who were church members, Lita and
Ana.

Lita had lived for years in the pastor's household and
with one other girl, showed most clearly the results of

[164]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

a slightly alien environment. She was clever and
executive, preferred the society of girls to that of boys,
had made the best of her opportunities to learn Eng-
lish, worked hard at school, and wished to go to Tutuila
and become a nurse or a teacher. Her ideals were thus
just such as might frequently be found from any ran-
dom selection of girls in a freshman class in a girls' col-
lege in this country. She coupled this set of individual
ambitions with a very unusual enthusiasm for a pious
father, and complied easily with his expressed wish for
her to become a church member. After she left the
pastor's household, she continued to go to school and
apply herself vigorously to her studies, and her one
other interest in life was a friendship with an older
cousin who spoke some English and had had superior
educational advantages in another island. Although
this friendship had most of the trappings of a "crush"
and was accompanied by the casual homosexual practices
which are the usual manifestations of most associations
between young people of the same sex, Lita's motivation
was more definitely ambition, a desire to master every
accessible detail of this alien culture in which she wished
to find a place.

Sona, who was two years younger than Lita and had
also lived for several years in the pastor's household,
presented a very similar picture. She was overbearing
in manner, arbitrary and tyrannous towards younger
people, impudently deferential towards her elders.
Without exceptional intellectual capacity she had excep-

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

tional persistence and had forced her way to the head of
the school by steady dogged application. Lita, more
intelligent and more sensitive, had left school for one
year because the teacher beat her and Sona had passed
above her, although she was definitely more stupid.
Sona came from another island. Both her parents were
dead and she lived in a large, heterogeneous household,
at the beck and call of a whole series of relatives. Intent
on her own ends, she was not enthusiastic about all this
labour and was also unenthusiastic about most of her
relatives. But one older cousin, the most beautiful girl
in the village, had caught her imagination. This cousin,
Manita, was twenty-seven and still unmarried. She had
had many suitors and nearly as many lovers but she was
of a haughty and aggressive nature and men whom she
deemed worthy of her hand were wary of her sophisti-
cated domineering manner. By unanimous vote she was
the most beautiful girl in the village. Her lovely
golden hair had contributed to half a dozen ceremonial
headdresses. Her strategic position in her own family
was heightened by the fact that her uncle, who had no
hereditary right to make a taupOy had declared Manita
to be his tawpo. There was no other taupo in the vil-
lage to dispute her claim. The murmurings were dying
out J the younger children spoke of her as a taupo with-
out suspicion 5 her beauty and ability as a dancer made it
expedient to thus introduce her to visitors. Her family
did not press her to marry, for the longer she remained
unmarried, the stronger waxed the upstart legend.

[i66]

''y.

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

Her last lover had been a widowe;', a talking chief of
intelligence and charm. He had loved Manita but he
would not marry her. She lacked the docility which he
demanded in a wife. Leaving Manita he searched in
other villages for some very young girl whose manners
were good but whose character was as yet unformed.

All this had a profound effect upon Sona, the ugly
little stranger over whose lustreless eyes cataracts were
already beginning to form. "Her sister" has no use for
marriage j neither had she, Sona. Essentially unfemi-
nine in outlook, dominated by ambition, she bolstered
up her preference for the society of girls and a career
by citing the example of her beautiful, wilful cousin.
Without such a sanction she might have wavered in her
ambitions, made so difficult by her already failing eye-
sight. As it was she went forward, blatantly proclaim-
ing her pursuit of ends different from those approved
by her fellows. Sona and Lita were not friends j the
difference in their sanctions was too great; their pro-
ficiency at school and an intense rivalry divided them.
Sona was not a church member. It would not have
interfered with her behaviour in the least but it was part
of her scheme of life to remain a school girl as long as
possible and thus fend off responsibilities. So she, as
often as the others, would answer, Laititi a^u ("I am
but young"). While Lita attached herself to her cousin
and attempted to learn from her every detail of another
life, Sona identified herself passionately with the
slightly more Europeanlsed family of the pastor, assert-

[167]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ing always their greater relationship to the new civilisa-
tion, calling loane's wife, Mrs. Johns, building up a
pitiable platform of fafalagi (foreign) mannerisms as
a springboard for future activities.

There was one other girl church member of Siufaga,
Ana, a girl of nineteen. Her motives were entirely
diflFerent. She was of a mild, quiescent nature, highly
intelligent, very capable. She was the illegitimate child
of a chief by a mother who had later married, run away,
married again, been divorced, and finally gone oflF to
another island. She formed no tie for Ana. Her
father was a widower, living in a brother's house and
Ana had been reared in the family of another brother.
This family approximated to a biological onej there
were two married daughters older than Ana, a son near
her age, a daughter of fourteen and a crowd of little
children. The father was a gentle, retiring man who
had built his house outside the village, "to escape from
the noise," he said. The two elder daughters married
young and went away to live in their husbands' house-
holds. Ana and her boy cousin both lived in the pastor's
household, while the next younger girl slept at home.
The mother had a great distrust of men, especially of
the young men of her own village. Ana should grow
up to marry a pastor. She was not strong enough for
the heavy work of the average Samoan wife. Her
aunt's continuous harping on this strain, which was
prompted mainly by a dislike of Ana's mother and a
fear of the daughter's leaving home to follow in her

[i68]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

mother's footsteps, had convinced Ana that she was a
great deal too delicate for a normal existence. This
theory received complete verification in the report of
the doctor who examined the candidates for the nursing
school and rejected her because of a heart murmur.
Ana, influenced by her aunt's gloomy foreboding, was
now convinced that she was too frail to bear children, or
at least not more than one child at some very distant
date. She became a church member, gave up dancing,
clung closer to the group of younger girls in the pastor's
school and to her foster home, the neurasthenic product
of a physical defect, a small, isolated family group and
the pastor's school.

These girls all represented the deviants from the
pattern in one direction j they were those who demanded
a different or improved environment, who rejected the
traditional choices. At any time, they, like all deviants,
might come into real conflict with the group. That they
did not was an accident of environment. The younger
girls in the pastor's group as yet showed fewer signs of
being influenced by their slightly artificial environment.
They were chaste where they would not otherwise have
been chaste, they had friends outside their relationship
group whom they would otherwise have viewed with
suspicion, they paid more attention to their lessons.
They still had not acquired a desire to substitute any
other career for the traditional one of marriage. This
was, of course, partly due to the fact that the pastor's
school was simply one influence in their lives. The girls

[169]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

still spent the greater proportion of their waking time at
home amid conventional surroundings. Unless a girl
was given some additional stimulus, such as unusual
home conditions, or possessed peculiarities of tempera-
ment, she was likely to pass through the school essen-
tially unchanged in her fundamental view of life. She
would acquire a greater respect for the church, a pref-
erence for slightly more fastidious living, greater confi-
dence in other girls. At the same time the pastor's
school offered a sufficient contrast to traditional Samoan
life to furnish the background against which deviation
could flourish. Girls who left the village and spent
several years in the boarding school under the tutelage
of white teachers were enormously influenced. Many
of them became nurses j the majority married pastors,
usually a deviation in attitude, involving as it did,
acceptance of a different style of living.

So, while religion itself offered little field for con-
flict^ the institutions promoted by religion might act as
stimuli to' new choices and when sufficiently reinforced
by other conditions might produce a type of girl who
deviated markedly from her companions*". That the
majority of Samoan girls are still unaffected by thesef
influences and pursue uncritically the traditional mode
of life is simply a testimony to the resistance of the
native culture, which in' its present slightly Euro-
peanised state, is replete with easy solutions for all con-
flicts} and to the apparent fact that adolescent girls in

[170]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

Samoa do not generate their own conflicts, but require a'
vigorous stimulus to produce them.

These conflicts which have been discussed are con-
flicts of children who deviate upwards, who wish to
exercise more choice than is traditionally permissible,
and who, in making their choices, come to unconven-
tional and bizarre solutions. The untraditional choices
which are encouraged by the educational system inaugu-
rated by the missionaries are education and the pursuit
of a career and marriage outside of the local group (in
the case of native pastors, teachers and nurses), prefer-
rence for the society of one's own sex through prolonged
and close association in school, a self-conscious evalua-
tion of existence, and the consequent making of self-
conscious choices. All of these make for increased spe-
cialisation, increased sophistication, greater emphasis
upon individuality, where an individual makes a con-
scious choice between alternate or opposing lines of
conduct. In the case of this group of girls, it is evident
that the mere presentation of conflicting choices was not
sufficient but that real conflict required the yeast of a
need for choice and in addition a culturally favourable
batter in which to work.

It will now be necessary to discuss another type of
deviant, the deviant in a downward direction, or the
delinquent. I am using the term delinquent to describe
the individual who is maladjusted to the demands of
her civilisation, and who comes definitely into conflict

[171]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

with her group, not because she adheres to a diflferent
standard, but because she violates the group standards
which are also her own.*

A Samoan family or a Samoan community might
easily come to conceive the conduct and standards of
Sona and Lita as anti-social and undesirable. Each was
following a plan of life which would not lead to mar-
riage and children. Such a choice on the part of the
females of any human community is, of course, likely to
be frowned upon. The girls who, responding to the
same stimuli, follow Sona's and Lita's example in the
future will also run this risk.

But were there really delinquent girls in this little
primitive village, girls who were incapable of develop-

* Such a distinction might well be made in the attitude towards
delinquency in our own civilisation. Delinquency cannot be de-
fined even within one culture in terms of acts alone, but attitudes
should also be considered. Thus the child who rifles her mother's
purse to get money to buy food for a party or clothes to wear to
a dance hall, who believes stealing is wrong, but cannot or will not
resist the temptation to steal, is a delinquent, if the additional legal
definition is given to her conduct by bringing her before some judi-
cial authority. The young Christian communist who gives away her
own clothes and also those of her brothers and sisters may be a
menace to her family and to a society based upon private property,
but she is not delinquent in the same sense. She has simply chosen
an alternative standard. The girl who commits sex ofifences with
all attendant shame, guilt, and inability to defend herself from be-
coming continually more involved in a course of action which she
is conscious is "wrong," until she becomes a social problem as an
unmarried mother or a prostitute, is, of course, delinquent. The
young advocate of free love who possesses a full quiver of ideals
and sanctions for her conduct, may be undesirable, but from the
standpoint of this discussion, she is not delinquent.

[172]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

ing new standards and incapable of adjusting them-
selves to the old ones? My group included two girls
who might be so described, one girl who was just reach-
ing puberty, the other a girl two years past puberty.
Their delinquency was not a new phenomenon, but in
both cases dated back several years. The members of
their respective groups unhesitatingly pronounced them
"bad girls," their age mates avoided them, and their
relatives regretted them. As the Samoan village had
no legal machinery for dealing with such cases, these are
the nearest parallels which it is possible to draw with
our "delinquent girl," substituting definite conflict with
unorganised group disapproval for the conflict with the
law which defines delinquency in our society.

Lola was seventeen, a tall, splendidly developed, in-
telligent hoyden. She had an unusual endowment in
her capacity for strong feeling, for enthusiasms, for
violent responses to individuals. Her father had died
when she was a child and she had been reared in a head-
less house. Her father's brother who was the matai
had several houses and he had scattered his large group
of dependants in several different parts of the village.
So Lola, two older sisters, two younger sisters, and a
brother a year older, were brought up by their mother,
a kindly but ineffective woman. The eldest sister mar-
ried and left the village when Lola was eight. The
next sister, Sami, five years older than Lola, was like
her mother, mild and gentle, with a soft undercurrent
of resentment towards life running through all her

[173]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

quiet words. She resented and disliked her younger
sister but she was no macch for her. Nito, her brother,
was a high-spirited and intelligent youth who might
have taught his sister a little wisdom had it not been
for the brother and s'lsttr taboo which kept them always
upon a formal footing. Aso, two years younger, was
like Sami without Sami's sullen resentment. She
adopted the plan of keeping out of Lola's way. The
youngest, Siva, was like Lola, intelligent, passionate,
easily aroused, but she was only eleven and merely
profited by her sister's bad example. Lola was quarrel-
some, insubordinate, impertinent. She contended every
point, objected to every request, shirked her work,
fought with her sisters, mocked her mother, went about
the village with a chip upon her shoulder. When she
was fourteen, she became so unmanageable at home that
her uncle sent her to live in the pastor's household. She
stayed there through a year of stormy scenes until she
was finally expelled after a fight with Mala, the other
delinquent. That she was not expelled sooner was out
of deference to her rank as the niece of a leading chief.
Her uncle realised the folly of sending her back to her
mother. She was almost sixteen and well developed
physically; and could be expected to add sex offences to
the list of her troublesome activities at any moment.
He took her to live in his own household under the
supervision of his very strong-minded, executive wife,
Pusa. Lola stayed there almost a year. It was a more
interesting household than any in which she had lived.

[274]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

Her uncle's rank made constant calls upon her. She
learned to make kava well, to dance with greater ease
and mastery. A trip to Tutuila relieved the monotony
of life J two cousins from another island came to visit,
and there was much gaiety about the house. As con-
sciousness of sex became more acute, she became slightly
subdued and tentative in her manner. Pusa was a hard
task master and for a while Lola seemed to enjoy the
novelty of a strong will backed by real authority.
But the novelty wore oflF. The cousins prolonged their
visit month after month. They persisted in treating
her as a child. She became bored, sullen, jealous.
Finally she ran away to other relatives, a very high
chief's family, in the next village. Here, temporarily,
was another house group of women folk, as the head of
the house was in Tutuila, and his wife, his mother and
his two children were the only occupants of the great
guest house. Lola's labour was welcomed, and she set
herself to currying favour with the high chief of the
family. At first this was quite easy, as she had run
away from the household of a rival chief and he appre-
ciated her public defection. There were only much
younger or much older girls in his household. Lola
received the attention which she craved. The little
girls resented her, but secretly admired her dashing
uncompromising manner. But she had only been estab-
lished here about a month when another chief, with a
young and beautiful taupo in his train, came to visit
her new chief and the whole party was lodged in the

[175]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

very house where she slept. Now began an endless
round of hospitable tasks, and worst of all she must wait
upon the pretty stranger who was a year younger than
herself, but whose rank as visiting taufo gave her prec-
edence. Lola again became troublesome. She quar-
relled with the younger girls, was impertinent to the
older ones, shirked her work, talked spitefully against
the stranger. Perhaps all of this might have been only
temporary and had no more far-reaching results than a
temporary lack of favour in her new household, had it
not been for a still more unfortunate event. The Don
Juan of the village was a sleek, discreet man of about
forty, a widower, a mataiy a man of circumspect manner
and winning ways. He was looking for a second wife
and turned his attention toward the visitor who was
lodged in the guest house of the next village. But
Fuativa was a cautious and calculating lover. He
wished to look over his future bride carefully and so he
visited her house casually, without any declaration of
his intention. And he noticed that Lola had reached a
robust girlhood and stopped to pluck this ready fruit
by the way, while he was still undecided about the more
serious business of matrimony.

With all her capacity for violence, Lola possessed
also a strong capacity for affection. Fuativa was a
skilled and considerate lover. Few girls were quite so
fortunate in their first lovers, and so few felt such un-
mixed regret when the first love affair was broken off.
Fuativa won her easily and after three weeks which

[176]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

were casual to him, and very important to her, he pro-
posed for the hand of the visitor. The proposal itself
might not have so completely enraged Lola although
her pride was sorely wounded. Still, plans to marry a
bride from such a great distance might miscarry. But
the affiaiiced girl so obviously demurred from the mar-
riage that the talking chiefs became frightened. Fua-
tiva was a rich man and the marriage ceremony would
bring many perquisites for the talking chief. If the girl
was allowed to go home and plead with her parents, or
given the opportunity to elope with some one else, there
would be no wedding perhaps and no rewards. The
public defloration ceremony is forbidden by law. That
the bridegroom was a government employe would fur-
ther complicate his position should he break the law.
So the anxious talking chief and the anxious suitor made
their plans and he was given access to his future bride.
The rage of Lola was unbounded and she took an im-
mediate revenge, publicly accusing her rival of being a
thief and setting the whole village by the ears. The
women of the host household drove her out with many
imprecations and she fled home to her mother, thus
completing the residence cycle begun four years ago.
She was now in the position of the delinquen: in our
society. She had continuously violated the group,
standards and she had exhausted all the solutions open:
to her. No other family group would open its doors to
a girl whose record branded her as a liar, a trouble
maker, a fighter, and a thief, for her misdeeds included

[177]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

continual petty thievery. Had she quarrelled with a
father or been outraged by a brother-in-law, a refuge
would have been easy to find. But her personality was
essentially unfortunate. In her mother's household she
made her sisters miserable, but she did not lord it over
them as she had done before. She was sullen, bitter,
vituperative. The young people of the village branded
her as the possessor of a lotu le aga, ("a bad heart")
and she had no companions. Her young rival left the
island to prepare for her wedding, or the next chapter
might have been Lola's doing her actual physical vio-
lence. When I left, she was living, idle, sullen, and
defiant in her long-suifering mother's house.

Mala's sins were slightly otherwise. Where Lola
was violent, Mala was treacherous j where Lola was
antagonistic. Mala was insinuating. Mala was younger,
having just reached puberty in January, the middle of
my stay on the island. She was a scrawny, ill-favoured
little girl, always untidily dressed. Her parents were
dead and she lived with her uncle, a sour, disgruntled
man of small position. His wife came from another
village and disliked her present home. The marriage
was childless. The only other member of the house
group was another niece who had divorced her hus-
band. She also was childless. None showed Mala any
affection, and they worked her unmercifully. The life
of the only young girl or boy in a Samoan house, in the
very rare cases when it occurs, is always very difficult.
In this case it was doubly so. Ordinarily other relatives

[178]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

in the neighbourhood would have handed their babies
over to her care, giving her a share in the activities of
happier and more populous households. But from her
early childhood she had been branded as a thief, a
dangerous charge in a country where there are no doors
or locks, and houses are left empty for a day at a time.
Her first offence had been to steal a foreign toy which
belonged to the chief's little son. The irate mother
had soundly berated the child, on boat day, on the beach
where all the people were gathered. When her name
was mentioned, the information that she was a thief
and a liar was tacked on as casually as was the remark
that another was cross-eyed or deaf. Other children
avoided her. Next door lived Tino, a dull good child,
a few months younger than Mala. Ordinarily these
two would have been companions and Mala always in-
sisted that Tino was her friend, but Tino indignantly
disclaimed all association with her. And as if her repu-
tation for thievery were not sufficient, she added a fur-
ther misdemeanour. She played with boys, preferred
boys' games, tied her lavalava like a boy. This be-
haviour was displayed to the whole village who were
vociferous in their condemnation. "She really was a
very bad girl. She stole j she liedj and she played
with boys." As in other parts of the world, the whole
odium fell on the girl, so the boys did not fight shy of
her. They teased her, bullied her, used her as general
errand boy and fag. Some of the more precocious boys
of her own age were already beginning to look to her

[179]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

for possibilities of other forms of amusement. Prob-
ably she will end by giving her favours to whoever asks
for them, and sink lower and lower in the village esteem
and especially in the opinion of her own sex from whom
she so passionately desires recognition and affection.
I Lola and Mala both seemed to be the victims of lack
if of affection. They both had unusual capacity for devo-
II tion and were abnormally liable to become jealous.
Both responded with pathetic swiftness to any mani-
festations of affection. At one end of the scale in their
need for affection, they were unfortunately placed at
the other end in their chance of receiving it. Lola had
a double handicap in her unfortunate temperament and
the greater amiability of her three sisters. Her tem-
peramental defects were further aggravated by the
absence of any strong authority in her immediate house-
hold. Sami, the docile sister, had been saddled with the
care of the younger children j Lola, harder to control,
was given no such saving responsibility. These condi-
tions were all as unusual as her demand and capacity
for affection. And, similarly, seldom were children as
desolate as Mala, marooned in a household of un-
sympathetic adults. So it would appear that their de-
linquency was produced by the combination of two sets
of casual factors, unusual emotional needs and unusual
home conditions. Less affectionate children in the same
environments, or the same children in more favourable
surroundings, probably would never have become as
definitely outcast as these.

[i8o]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

Only one other girl in the three villages calls for
consideration under this conce ption o f delin quency and
she received far less general condemnation than either
of the others. This was Sala, who lived in the third
village. She lived in a household of seven, consisting
of her widowed mother, her younger brother of ten,
her grandmother, her uncle and his wife, and their
two-year-old son. This presented a fairly well-bal-
anced family group and there were in addition many
other relatives close by. Sala had been sent to live in
the pastor's house but had speedily got involved in sex
offences and been expelled. Her attitude towards this
pastor was still one of unveiled hostility. She was
stupid, underhanded, deceitful and she possessed no
aptitude for the simplest mechanical tasks. Her inept-
ness was the laughing stock of the village and her lovers
were many and casual, the fathers of illegitimate chil-
dren, men whose wives were temporarily absent, wit-
less boys bent on a frolic. It was a saying among the
girls of the village that Sala was apt at only_one art,
sex, and that she, who couldn't even sew thatch or
weave blinds, would never get a husband. The social
attitude towards her was one of contempt, rather than
of antagonism, and she had experienced it keenly
enough to have sunk very low in her own eyes. She
had a sullen furtive manner, lied extravagantly in her
assertions of skill and knowledge, and was ever on
the alert for slights and possible innuendoes. She came
into no serious conflict with her community. Her father

[i8i]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

beat her occasionally in a half-hearted manner, but her
stupidity was her salvation for the Samoan possesses
more charity towards weakness than towards mis-
directed strength. Sooner or later Sala's random sex
experiences will probably lead to pregnancy, resulting
in a temporary restriction of her activities and a much
greater dependency upon her family. This economic
dependence which in her case will be reinforced by her
lack of manual skill will be strong enough to give her
family a whip hand over her and force her to at least
moderate her experimentation. She may not marry for
many years and possibly will always be rated too in-
efficient for such responsibility.

The only delinquent in the making, that is a child
who showed marked possibilities of increasing mis-
behaviour, was Siva, Lola's eleven-year-old little sis-
ter. She had the same obstreperous nature and was
always engaging in fist fights with the other children,
or hurling deadly insults after fleeing backs. She Jiad
the same violent craving for affection. But her uncle,
profiting by her sister's unfortunate development, had
taken her at the age of ten into his immediate family
and so she was spending her pre-adolescent years under
a much firmer regime than had her sister. And she
differed from her sister in one respect, which was
likely to prove her salvation. Where Lola had no sense
of humour and no lightness of touch, Siva had both.
She was a gifted mimic, an excruciatingly funny dancer,
a born comedian. People forgave her her violence and

[182]

THE GIRL IN CONFLICT

her quarrelsomeness for sheer mirth over her propitia-
tory antics. If this facility continues to endear her to
her aunts and cousins, who already put up with any
number of pranks and fits of temper from her, she will
probably not follow in her sister's steps. One affection-
ate word makes her shift her attention, and she has a
real gift for affection. Once at a dancing party I had
especially requested the children to be good and not
waste time in endless bickerings and jealousies. I
selected three little girls, the traditional number, to
dance, and one of them, Meta, claimed that she had a
sore foot. I turned hastily to Siva and asked her to
fill out the figure. She was preparing to do so, with
none too good grace at being second choice, when Meta,
who had merely been holding back for more urging,
leaped to her feet, and took the empty place. Siva was
doubling up her fists ready to fly at M eta's throat when
she caught my eye. She swallowed furiously, and then
jerked the flower wreath from around her own neck and
flung it over Meta's head. With better luck than her
sister, she will not come into lasting conflict with her
society.

And here ends the tale of serious conflict or serious
deviation from group standards. The other girls varied
as to whether they were subjected to the superior super-
vision of the pastor's household or not, as to whether
they came from households of rank or families of small
prestige, and most of all as to whether they lived in a
biological family or a large heterogeneous household.

[183]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

/
I ii But with differences in temperament equal to those

*| found among us, though with a possibly narrower range
; of intellectual ability, they showed a surprising uni-
formity of knowledge, skill and attitude, and presented
a picture of orderly, regular development in a flexible,
but strictly delimited, environment.

[184]

XII

MATURITY AND OLD AGE

BECAUSE the community makes no distinction be-
tween unmarried girls and the wives of untitled men in |
the demands which it makes upon them, and because
there is seldom any difference in sex experience between
the two groups, the dividing line falls not between mar-
ried and unmarried but between grown women and
growing girls in industrial activity and between the
wives of matals and their less important sisters in cere-
monial affairs. The girl of twenty-two or twenty-three
who is still unmarried loses her laissez faire attitude.
Family pressure is an effective cause in bringing about
this change. She is an adult, as able as her married
sisters and her brothers' young wives j she is expected
to contribute as heavily as they to household under-
takings. She lives among a group of contemporaries
upon whom the responsibilities of marriage are making
increased demands. Rivalry and emulation enter in.
And also she may be becoming a little anxious about
her own marital chances. The first preoccupation with
sex experimentation has worn itself out and she settles
down to increase her value as a wife. In native theory
a girl knows how to sew thatch, but doesn't really make
thatch until she is married. In actual practice the adult

[185]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

i I unmarried girls perform household and agricultural
'/tasks identical with those performed by their married
' sisters, except that whereas pregnancy and nursing chil-
dren tie the young married women to the house, the
unmarried girls are free to go off on long fish-
ing expeditions, or far inland in search of weaving
materials.

A married couple may live either in the household of
the girl or of the boy, choice being made on the basis
of rank, or the industrial needs of the two households.
The change of residence makes much less difference to
the girl than to the boy. A married woman's life is
lived in such a narrow sphere that her only associates
are the women of her household. Residence in her
husband's village instead of her own does not narrow
her life, for her participation in village affairs will
remain slight and unimportant until her husband
assumes a title which confers status upon her also. If
her husband's household is in her own village, her
responsibilities will be increased somewhat because she
will be subject to continual demands from her own
near relatives as well as from those of her husband.

There is no expectation of conflict between daughter-
in-law and mother-in-law. The mother-in-law must
be respected because she is an elder of the household
and an insolent daughter-in-law is no more tolerated
than an insubordinate daughter or niece. But tales of
the traditional lack of harmony which exists in our
civilisation were treated by the Samoans with con-

[i86]

MATURITY AND OLD AGE

temptuous amusement. Where the emotional ties be-
tween parents and children are so weak, it was impos-
sible to make them see it as an issue between a man's
mother and man's wife, in which jealousy played a
part. They saw it simply as failure on the part of the
young and unimportant person to pay proper respect
to the old, granting of course that there were always
irascible old people from whom it was expedient to
move away. The same thing holds true for the young
man, if he goes to live in his father-in-law's house. If
the father-in-law is the mataiy he has complete authority
over his daughter's husband} if he is only an untitled
old man, he must still be treated with respect.

But change of village for the young man makes a
great difference, because he must take his place in a
new Aumaga, and work with strangers instead of with
the"^ys with whom he has worked and played since
childhood. Very often he never becomes as thoroughly
assimilated to the new group as he was to the old. He
stands more upon his dignity. He works with his new
companions but does not play with them. The social
life of the Aumaga centres about the group courtesies
which they pay to visiting girls. In his own village
a man will accompany the younger boys on these occa-
sions for many years after he is married. But in his
wife's village, such behaviour becomes suddenly less
appropriate. Random amatory adventures are also
more hazardous when he is living as a member of his
wife's household. And although his transition from

[187]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

the status of a young man to the status of a matai is
easier, he ages more quickly j although he may earn
great respect in his adopted village, he commands
less of its affection.

■In most marriages there is no sense of setting up a
new and separate establishment. The change is felt in
the change of residence for either husband or wife and
in the reciprocal relations which spring up between the
two families. But the young couple live in the main
household, simply receiving a bamboo pillow, a mos-
quito net and a pile of mats for their bed. Only for
(Ithe chief or the chief's son is a new house built. The
(wife works with all the women of the household and
waits upon all the men. The husband shares the enter-
prises of the other men and boys. Neither in personal
service given or received are the two marked off as a
unit. Nor does marriage of either brother or sister
slacken the avoidance rules j it merely adds another
individual, the new sister or brother-in-law, to whom
the whole series of avoidances must be applied. In the
sexual relation alone are the two treated as one. For
even in the care of the young children and in the de-
cisions as to their future, the uncles and aunts and
grandparents participate as fully as the parents. It is
only when a man is matai as well as father, that he has
control over his own children j and when this is so, the
relationship is blurred in opposite fashion, for he has
the same control over many other young people who
are less closely related to him.

[i88]

MATURITY AND OLD AGE

The pregnant young wife is surrounded by a multi-
tude of taboos, most of which are prohibitions against
solitary activities. She must not walk alone, sit alone,
dance alone, gather food alone, eat alone, or when
only her husband is present. All of these taboos are
explained by the amiable doctrine that only things
which are wrong are done in solitude and that any
wrong deed committed by the expectant mother will -v
injure the child. It seems simpler to prohibit solitary
acts than wrong ones. There are also ghosts which are,,^-
particularly likely to injure the pregnant woman, and
she is warned against walking in ghost-ridden places.
She is warned against doing too heavy work and against
getting chilled or overheated. While pregnancy is not
treated with anything like the consideration which is
often given it here, her first pregnancy gives a womaft j^
a certain amount of social prominence. This promi-
nence is in direct proportion to her rank, and the young
wife whose child is the presumptive heir to some high
title is watched over with great solicitude. Relatives
gather from great distances for the confinement and
birth feast, which is described as the mother's feast,
rather than the feast in honour of either child or father.

After the birth of the first child, the other children
arrive frequently and with small remark. Old gossips
count them and comment on the number living, dead or
miscarried in previous births. A pig is roasted for the
birth feast to which only the near relatives are invited.
The mother of many children is rather taken for

[189]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

granted than praised. The barren woman is mildly
^ execrated and her misfortune attributed to loose living.
There were three barren older women on Tauj all
three were midwives and reputed to be very wise. Now
well past the child-bearing age, they were reaping the
reward of the greater application to the intricacies of
their calling with which they had compensated for their
barrenness.

The young married women of twenty to thirty are a
bu sy, chee rful group. They become church members
and wear hats to church. When they have not a baby
at the breast, they are doing heavy work on the planta-
tions, fishing or making tapa. No other important
event will ever happen to them again. If their hus-
bands die, they will probably take new husbands, and
those of lower rank. If their husbands become mataisj
they will also acquire a place in the fono of the women.
But it is only the woman with a flair for political wire-
, pulling and the luck to have either important relatives
or an important husband who gets any real satisfaction
out of the social organisation of the village.

The young men do not settle as early into a groove.
What her first child is to a woman his title is to a man,
and while each new child is less of an event in her life,
a new title is always a higher one and a greater event
in his. A man rarely attains his first title before he is

S thirty, often not before he is forty. All the years be-
tween his entrance into the Aumaga and his entrance
' into the Fono are years of striving. He cannot acquire

[190]

^ s

MATURITY AND OLD AGE

a reputation and then rest upon it or another claimant
to the same title will take advantage of his indolence
and pass him in the race. One good catch of fish does
not make him a fisherman nor one housebeam neatly
adzed, a carpenter j the whole emphasis is upon a steady
demonstration of increasing skill which will be earnest
of the necessary superiority over his fellows. Only the
lazy, the shiftless, the ambitionless fail to respond to
this competition. The one exception to this is in the
case of the son or heir of the high chief who may be
made the manaia at twenty. But here his high rank
has already subjected him to more rigorous discipline
and careful training than the other youths, and as
manaia y he is the titular head of the Aumaga, and must
lead it well or lose his prestige.

Once having acquired a matai name and entered the
FonOy differences in temperament prevail. The matai
name he receives may be a very small one, carrying with
it no right to a post in the council house, or other pre-
rogatives. It may be so small that matai though he is,
he does not try to command a household, but lives in-
stead in the shadow of some more important relative.
But he will be a member of the FonOy classed with the
elders of the village, and removed forever from the
hearty group activities of the young men. Should he
become a widower and wish to court a new wife, he can
only do so by laying aside his m^atai name and enter-
ing her house under the fiction that he is still a youth.
His main preoccupation is the affairs of the village j his

[191]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

main diversion, hours spent in ceremonious argument
in some meeting. He always carries his bundle of
. beaten cocoanut fibre and as he talks, he rolls the fibres
/ together on his bare thigh.

The less ambitious rest upon this achievement. The
more ambitious continue the game, for higher titles, for
, I greater prestige as craftsmen or orators, for the control

^v^MiL^of more strings in the political game. At last the
preference for the most able, the very preference which,
in defiance of laws of primogeniture or direct descent,
may have given a man his title, takes it away from him.
For should he live beyond his prime, fifty-five or sixty,
his name is taken from him and given to another, and
he is given a "little matal name," so that he may still sit
with the other matais and drink his kava. These old
men stay at home, guard the house while the others
go inland to the plantations, superintend the children,
braid cinet and give advice, or in a final perverse asser-
tion of authority, fail to give it. One young chief who
had been given his father's name during his father's
lifetime, complained to me: "I had no old man to help
me. My father was angry that his title was given to me
and he would tell me nothing. My mother was wise
but she came from another island and did not know well
the ancient ways of our village. There was no old one
in the house to sit with me in the evening and fill my
ears with the things from the olden time. A young
matai should always have an old man beside him, who,

[192]

MATURITY AND OLD AGE

even though he is deaf and cannot always hear his
questions, can still tell him many things."

The women's lives pursue a more even tenor. The
wives of chiefs and talking chiefs have to give some
time to the mastery of ceremonial. The old women
who become midwives or doctors pursue their profes- 1
sions but seldom and in a furtive, private fashion. The I
menopause is marked by some slight temperamental in-
stability, irritability, finickiness about food, a tendency
to sudden whims and inexplicable fancies. Once past
the menopause and relieved of child-bearing, a woman
turns her attention again to the heavy work of the
plantations. The hardest work of the village is done
by women between forty-five and fifty-five. Then, as i j
age approaches, she settles down to performing the
skilled tasks in the household, to weaving and tapa
making.

Where a man is disqualified from active work by
rheumatism, elephantiasis, or general feebleness, his
role as a teacher is diminished. He can teach the
aspirant young fisherman the lore of fishing but not the
technique. The old woman on the other hand is mis-
tress of housebound crafts and to her must go the girl
who is ambitious to become a skilled weaver. Another
can gather the herbs which she needs for her medicines,
while she keeps the secret of compounding them. The
ceremonial burning of the candle-nut to obtain black
dye is in the hands of very old women. And also these

[193]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

old women are usually more of a power within the
household than the old men. The men rule partly by
the authority conferred by their titles, but their wives
and sisters rule by force of personality and knowledge
of human nature. A life-long preoccupation within the
smaller group makes them omniscient and tyrannical.
They suffer no diminution of prestige except such as is
inherent in the complete loss of their faculties.

The feeling for generation is retained until death,
and the very old people sit in the sun and talk softly
without regard for taboo or sex.

[194]

XIII

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT
OF SAMOAN CONTRASTS

FOR many chapters we have followed the lives of
Samoan girls, watched them change from babies to
baby-tenders, learn to make the oven and weave fine
mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more
active members of the household, defer marriage
through as many years of casual love-making as pos-
sible, finally marry and settle down to rearing children
who will repeat the same cycle. As far as our material
permitted, an experiment has been conducted to discover
what the process of development was like in a society
very different from our own. Because the length of
human life and the complexity of our society did not
permit us to make our experiment here, to choose a
group of baby girls and bring them to maturity under
conditions created for the experiment, it was necessary
to go instead to another country where history had set
the stage for us. There we found girl children pass-
ing through the same process of physical development
through which our girls go, cutting their first teeth and
losing them, cutting their second teeth, growing tall and
ungainly, reaching puberty with their first menstruation,
gradually reaching physical maturity, and becoming

[195]

V

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ready to produce the next generation. It was possible
to say: Here are the proper conditions for an experi-
ment j the developing girl is a constant factor in
America and in Samoa j the civilisation of America and
the civilisation of Samoa are different. In the course
of development, the process of growth by which the girl
baby becomes a grown woman, are the sudden and con-
spicuous bodily changes which take place at puberty
accompanied by a development which is spasmodic,
emotionally charged, and accompanied by an awakened
religious sense, a flowering of idealism, a great desire
for assertion of self against authority — or not? Is
adolescence a period of mental and emotional distress
for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period
of misery for the small baby? Can we think of ado-
lescence as a time in the life history of every girl child
which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as
surely as it implies a change in the girl's body?

Following the Samoan girls through every aspect of
their lives we have tried to answer this question, and
we found throughout that we had to answer it in the
egative. The adolescent girl in Samoa differed from
her sister who had not reached puberty in one chief re-
spect, that in the older girl certain bodily changes were
present which were absent in the younger girl. There
were no other great differences to set off the group
passing through adolescence from the group which
would become adolescent in two years or the group
which had become adolescent two years before.

■^v [196]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

And if one girl past puberty is undersized while her
cousin is tall and able to do heavier work, there will be
a difference between them, due to their different physi-
cal endowment, which will be far greater than that
which is due to puberty. The tall, husky girl will be
isolated from her companions, forced to do longer,
more adult tasks, rendered shy by a change of clothing,
while her cousin, slower to attain her growth, will still
be treated as a child and will have to solve only the
slightly fewer problems of childhood. The precedent
of educators here who recommend special tactics in the
treatment of adolescent girls translated into Samoan
terms would read: Tall girls are different from short
girls of the same age, we must adopt a different method
of educating them.

But when we have answered the question we set out
to answer we have not finished with the problem. A
further question presents itself. If it is proved that
adolescence is not necessarily a specially difficult period
in a girl's life — and proved it is if we can find any yv \
society in which that is so — then what accpunts for the ; \

presence of storm and stress in American adolescents? j
First, we may say quite simply, that there must be some- ,
thing in the two civilisations to account for the '
difference. If the same process takes a different form ,
in two different environments, we cannot make any ex- j

planations in terms of the process, for that is the same |

in both cases. But the social environment is very j o,.. I
different and it is to it that we must look for an explana- i

[197]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

tion. What is there in Samoa which is absent in
America, what is there in America which is absent in
Samoa, which will account for this diflFerence?

Such a question has enormous implications and any
attempt to answer it will be subject to many possibilities
of error. But if we narrow our question to the way in
which aspects of Samoan life which irremediably affect
the life of the adolescent girl differ from the forces
which influence our growing~girls, it is possible to try
to answer it.

— The background of these differences is a broad one,
with two important components j one is due. to charac-
teristics which are Samoan, the other to characteristics
which are primitive.

The Samoan background which makes growing up so
easy, so simple a matter, is the general casualness of the
whole so ciety. For Samoa is a place where no^neplaVs
for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no
one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for
special ends. Disagreements between parent and child
are settled by the child's moving across the street, be-
tween a man and his village by the man's removal to the
next village, between a husband and his wife's seducer
by a few fine mats. Neither poverty nor great disasters
threaten the people to make them hold their lives dearly
and tremble for continued existence. No implacable
gods, swift to anger and strong to punish, disturb the
even tenor of their days. Wars and cannibalism are
long since passed away and now the greatest cause for

[198]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

tears, short of death itself, Is a journey of a relative to ^
another island. No one is hurried along in life or |
punished harshly for slowness of development. In-
stead the gifted, the precocious, are held back, until the
slowest among them have caught the pace. And in ,
personal relations, caring is as slight. Love and hate,
jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement, are all i
matters of weeks. From the first months of its life, /
when the child is handed carelessly from one woman's !
hands to another's, the lesson is learned of not caring
for one person greatly, not setting high hopes on any '
one relationship.

And just as we may feel that the Occident penalises
those unfortunates who are born into Western civilisa-
tion with a taste for meditation and a complete distaste
for activity, so we may say that Samoa is kind to those
who have learned the lesson of not caring, and hard
upon those few individuals who have failed to learn It.
Lola and Mala and little Siva, Lola's sister, all were
girls with a capacity for emotion greater than their'
fellows. And Lola and Mala, passionately desiring [
affection and too violently venting upon the community
their disappointment over their lack of It, were both
delinquent, unhappy misfits in a society which gave all
the rewards to those who took defeat lightly and turned
to some other goal with a smile.

In this casual attitude towards life, in this avoid- j
ance of conflict, of poignant situations, Samoa contrasts '
strongly not only with America but also with most prlm-

[199]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

itive civilisations. And however much we may deplore
such an attitude and feel that important personalities
and great art are not born in so shallow a society, we
must recognise that here is a strong factor in the pain-
less development from childhood to womanhood. For
where no one feels very strongly, the adolescent will
not be tortured by poignant situations. There are no
such disastrous choices as those which confronted young
people who felt that the service of God demanded for-
swearing the world forever, as in the Middle Ages, or
cutting off one's finger as a religious offering, as among
the Plains Indians. So, high up in our list of explana-
tions we must place the lack of deep feeling which the
Samoans have conventionalised until it is the very
framework of all their attitudes toward life.

And next there is the most striking way in which all
/ 'isolated primitive civilisation and many modern ones
differ from our own, in the number of choices which
are permitted to each individual. Our children grow
up to find a world of choices dazzling their unaccus-
tomed eyes. In religion they may be Catholics,
Protestants, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Agnostics,
Atheists, or even pay no attention at all to religion.
This is an unthinkable situation in any primitive society
not exposed to foreign influence. There is one set of
gods, one accepted religious practice, and if a man does
not believe, his only recourse is to believe less than his
fellows j he may scofF but there is no new faith to which
he may turn. Present-day Manu'a approximates this

[200]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

condition J all are Christians of the same sect. There is
no conflict in matters of belief although there is a dif-
ference in practice between Church-members and non-
Church-members. And it was remarked that in the
case of several of the growing girls the need for choice <
between these two practices may some day produce a /
conflict. But at present the Church makes too slight a
bid for young unmarried members to force the adoles-
cent to make any decision.

Similarly, our children are faced with half a dozen
standards of morality: a double sex standard for men
and women, a single standard for men and women, and
groups which advocate that the single standard should
be freedom while others argue that the single standard
should be absolute monogamy. Trial marriage, com-
panionate marriage, contract marriage — all these pos-
sible solutions of a social impasse are paraded before the
growing children while the actual conditions in their
own communities and the moving pictures and maga-
zines inform them of mass violations of every code,
violations which march under no banners of social re-
form.

The Samoan child faces no such dilemma. Sex is a i
natural, pleasurable thing; the freedom with which it j'
may be indulged in is limited by just one consideration, [
social status. Chiefs' daughters and chiefs' wives
should indulge in no extra-marital experiments. Re- 1^
sponsible adults, heads of households and mothers of
families should have too many important matters on

[201]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

hand to leave them much time for casual amorous ad-
ventures. Every one in the community agrees about
the matter, the only dissenters are the missionaries who
dissent so vainly that their protests are unimportant.
But as soon as a sufficient sentiment gathers about the
missionary attitude with its European standard of sex
behaviour, the need for choice, the forerunner of con-
flict, will enter into Samoan society.

Our young people are faced by a series of different
groups which believe different things and advocate
different practices, and to each of which some trusted
friend or relative may belong. So a girl's father may
be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a tee-
totaler, with a strong literary preference for Edmund
Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who
believes that woman's place is in the home, that young
girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not
smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening.
But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a
believer in high living, a strong advocate of States'
Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais,
likes to go to musical shows and horse races. Her aunt
is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of woman's rights, an
internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto,
is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time
in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother,
whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years
at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast
concerning all things mediaeval, writes mystical poetry,

[202]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seek-
ing for the lost secret of mediasval stained glass. Her
mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materi-
alist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his
youth J he scorns art, believes that science will save the
world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought
before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by
experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her
mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much
interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-
participator in life, who in spite of her daughter's devo-
tion to her will not make any move to enlist her
enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own
household. Add to it the groups represented, de-
fended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the
books which she reads by accident, and the list of
possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incom-
patible with one another, becomes appalling.

The Samoan girl's choices are far otherwise. Her
father is a member of the Church and so is her uncle.
Her father lives in a village where there is good fishing,
her uncle in a village where there are plenty of cocoanut
crabs. Her father Is a good fisherman and in his house
there is plenty to eatj her uncle is a talking chief and
his frequent presents of bark cloth provide excellent
dance dresses. Her paternal grandmother, who lives
with her uncle, can teach her many secrets of healing;
her maternal grandmother, who lives with her mother,
is an expert weaver of fans. The boys in her uncle's

[203]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

village are admitted younger into the Aumaga and are
not much fun when they come to callj but there are
three boys in her own village whom she likes very
much. And her great dilemma is whether to live with
"""'i her father or her uncle, a frank, straightforward prob-
l^ { lem which introduces no ethical perplexities, no question
^ of impersonal logic. Nor will her choice be taken as a

personal matter, as the American girPs allegiance to the
views of one relative might be interpreted by her other
relatives. The Samoans will be sure she chose one
residence rather than the other for perfectly good
reasons, the food was better, she had a lover in one
village, or she had quarrelled with a lover in the other
village. In each case she was making concrete choices
within one recognised pattern of behaviour. She was
never called upon to make choices involving an actual
rejection of the standards of her social group, such as
the daughter of Puritan parents, who permits indis-
criminate caresses, must make in our society.

7^ And not only are our developing children faced by a

series of groups advocating different and mutually ex-
clusive standards, but a more perplexing problem
presents itself to them. Because our civilisation is
woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any
one group accepts will be found to contain numerous
contradictions. So if the girl has given her allegiance
whole-heartedly to some one group and has accepted in
good faith their asseverations that they alone are right
and all other philosophies of life are Antichrist and
'^* [204]

I OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

■4,
anathema, her troubles are still not over. While the

less thoughtful receives her worst blows in the discovery
that what father thinks is good, grandfather thinks is
bad, and that things which are permitted at home are
banned at school, the more thoughtful child has subtler
difficulties in store for her. If she has philosophically
accepted the fact that there are several standards among
which she must choose, she may still preserve a child-
like faith in the coherence of her chosen philosophy.
Beyond the immediate choice which was so puzzling
and hard to make, which perhaps involved hurting her
parents or alienating her friends, she expects peace.
But she has not reckoned with the fact that each of the
philosophies with which she is confronted is itself but
the half-ripened fruit of compromise. If she accept
Christianity, she is immediately confused between the
Gospel teachings concerning peace and the value of
human life and the Church's whole-hearted acceptance
of war. The compromise made seventeen centuries ago
between the Roman philosophy of war and domination,
and the early Church doctrine of peace and humility, is
still present to confuse the modern child. If she ac-
cepts the philosophic premises upon which the Declara-
tion of Independence of the United States was
founded, she finds herself faced with the necessity of
reconciling the belief in the equality of man and our
institutional pledges of equality of opportunity with
our treatment of the Negro and the Oriental. The
diversity of standards in present-day society is so strik-

[205]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ing that the dullest, the most incurious, cannot fail to
notice it. And this diversity is so old, so embodied in
semi-solutions, in those compromises between different
philosophies which we call Christianity, or democracy,
or humanitarianism, that it baffles the most intelligent,
the most curious, the most analytical.

rSo for the explanation of the lack of poignancy in the
choices of growing girls in Samoa, we must look to the
temperament of the Samoan civilisation whkh discounts
strong feeling. But for the explanation of the lack
of conflict we must look principally to the difference
between a simple, homogenous primitive ciyUisatioii, a
civilisation which changes so slowly that to each genera-
tion it appears static, and a motley, diverse, hetero-
^ ^eneous modern civilisation.

And in making the comparison there is a third con-
sideration, the lack of neuroses among the Samoans, the
great number of neuroses among ourselves. We must
examine the factors in the early education of the Samoan
children which have fitted them for a normal, un-
neurotic development. The findings of the behav-
iourists and of the psychoanalysts alike lay great em-
phasis upon the enormous r51e which is played by the
environment of the first few years. Children who have
been given a bad start are often found to function badly
later on when they are faced with important choices.
And we know that the more severe the choice, the more
conflict j the more poignancy is attached to the demands
made upon the individual, the more neuroses will re-

[206]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

suit. History, in the form of the last war, provided a
stupendous illustration of the great number of maimed
and handicapped individuals whose defects showed only
under very special and terrible stress. Without the war,
there is no reason to believe that many of these shell-
shocked individuals might not have gone through life
unremarked 3 the bad start, the fears, the complexes, the
bad conditionings of early childhood, would never have
borne positive enough fruit to attract the attention of
society.

The implications of this observatioii are double.
Samoa's lack of difficult situations, of conflicting choice,
of situations in which fear or pain or anxiety are sharp-
ened to a knife edge will probably account for a large
part of the absence of psychological maladjustment.
Just as a low-grade moron would not be hopelessly
handicapped in Samoa, although he would be a public
charge in a large American city, so individuals with
slight nervous instability have a much more favourable
chance in Samoa than in America. Furthermore the
amount of individualisation, the range of variation, is
much smaller in Samoa. Within our wider limits of
deviation there are inevitably found weak and non-
resistant temperaments. And just as our society shows
a greater development of personality, so also it shows a
larger proportion of individuals who have succumbed
before the complicated exactions of modern life.

Nevertheless, it is possible that there are factors in
the early environment of the Samoan child which are

[207]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMO \

particularly favourable to the establishment of nervous
stability. Just as a child from a better home environ-
ment in our civilisation may be presumed to have a
better chance under all circumstances it is conceivable
that the Samoan child is not only handled more gently
by its culture but that it is also better equipped for those
difficulties which it does meet.

Such an assumption is given force by the fact that
little Samoan children pass apparently unharmed
through experiences which often have grave effects on
individual development in our civilisation. Our life
histories ire filled with the later difficulties which can
be traced back to some early, highly charged experience
with sex or with birth or death. And yet Samoan chil-
dren are familiarised at an early age and without disas-
ter, with all three. It is very possible that there are
aspects of the life of the young child in Samoa which
equip it particularly well for passing through life with-
out nervous instability.

With this hypothesis in mind it is worth while to
Jl consider in more detail which parts of the young child's
' Social environment are most strikingly different from
ours. Most of these centre about the family situation,
the environment which impinges earliest and most in-'
tensely upon the child's consciousness. The organisa-
tion of a Samoan household eliminates at one stroke, in
almost all cases, many of the special situations which
are believed to be productive of undesirable emotional
sets. The youngest, the oldest, and the only child,

[208]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

hardly ever occur because of the large number of chil-
dren in a household, all of whom receive the same
treatment. Few children are weighted down with re-
sponsibility, or rendered domineering and overbearing
as eldest children so often are, or isolated, condemned
to the society of adults and robbed of the socialising
effect of contact with other children, as only children
so often are. No child is petted and spoiled until its
view of its own deserts is hopelessly distorted, as is so
often the fate of the youngest child. But in the few
cases where Samoan family life does approximate ours,
the special attitudes incident to order of birth and to
close aifectional ties with the parent tend to develop.

The close relationship between parent and child, j
which has such a decisive influence upon so many in our
civilisation, that submission to the parent or defiance of =
the parent may become the dominating pattern of a life-;;
time, is not found in Samoa. Children reared in house- 1
holds where there are a half dozen adult women to care
for them and dry their tears, and a half dozen adult
males, all of whom represent constituted authority, do
not distinguish their parents as sharply as our children
do. The image of the fostering, loving mother, or the u
admirable father, which may serve to determine aff ec- '
tional choices later in life, is a composite _affair, com-
posed of several aunts, cousins, older sisters and grand-
mothers j of chief, father, uncles, brothers and cousins.
Instead of learning as its first lesson that here is a
kind mother whose special and principal care is for its

[209]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

welfare, and a father whose authority is to be deferred
to, the Samoan baby learns that its world is composed
of a hierarchy of male and female adults, all of whom
can be depended upon and must be deferred to.
•*^^'The lack of specialised feeling which results from
this diffusion of affection in the household is further re-
inforced by the segregation of the boys from the girls,
so that a child regards the children of the opposite
sex as taboo relatives, regardless of individuality, or as
present enemies and future lovers, again regardless of
individuality. And the substitution of relationship for
preference in forming friendships completes the work.
By the time she reaches puberty the Samoan girl has
learned to subordinate choice in the selection of friends
or lovers to an observance of certain categories. Friends
must be relatives of one's own sexj lovers, non-relatives.
All claim of personal attraction or congeniality between
relatives of opposite sex must be flouted. All of this
means that casual sex relations carry no onujjQf_strong_
attachment, that the marriage of convenience dictated
by economic and social considerations is easily born and
casually broken without strong emotion.

Nothing could present a sharper contrast to the
average American home, with its small number of chil-
dren, the close, theoretically permanent tie between the
parents, the drama of the entrance of each new child
upon the scene and the deposition of the last baby.
Here the growing girl learns to depend upon a few
individuals, to expect the rewards of life from cer-

[210]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

tain kinds of personalities. With this first set towards
preference in personal relations she grows up playing
with boys as well as with girls, learning to know well
brothers and cousins and schoolmates. She does not
think of boys as a class but as individuals, nice ones like
the brother of whom she is fond, or disagreeable, domi-
neering ones, like a brother with whom she is always on
bad terms. Preference in physical make-up, in tempera-
ment, in character, develops and forms the foundations
for a very different adult attitude in which choice plays
a vivid role. The Samoan girl never tastes the rewards
of romantic love as we know it, nor does she suffer as
an oT3 mald^wHoTias appealed to no lover or found no
Iov"er appealing to her, or as the frustrated wife in a
marriage which hasnot fulfilled her high demands.

Having learned a little of the art of disciplining sex
feeling into special channels approved by the whole
personality, we will be inclined to account our solution
better than the Samoans. To attain what we consider a
more dignified standard of personal relations we are
willing to pay the penalty of frigidity in marriage and
a huge toll of barren, unmarried women who move in
unsatisfied procession across the American and English
stage. But while granting the desirability of this de-
velopment of sensitive, discriminating response to per-
sonality, as a better basis for dignified human lives than
an automatic, undifferentiated response to sex attraction,
we may still, in the light of Samoan solutions, count
our methods exceedingly expensive.

[211]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

The strict segregation of related boys and girls, the
institutionalised hostility between pre-adolescent chil-
dren of opposite sexes in Samoa are cultural features
with which we are completely out of sympathy. For
the vestiges of such attitudes, expressed in our one-sex
schools, we are trying to substitute coeducation, to
habituate one sex to another sufficiently so that dif-
ference of sex will be lost sight of in the more im-
portant and more striking differences in personality.
There are no recognisable gains in the Samoan system
of taboo and segregation, of response to a group rather
than response to an individual. But when we contrast
the other factor of difference the conclusion is not so
sure. What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown,
biological family opposing Its closed circle of affection
to a forbidding world, of the strong ties between parents
and children, ties which imply an active personal rela-
tion from birth until death? Specialisation of affection,
it is true, but at the price of many individuals' preserv-
ing through life the attitudes of dependent children, of
ties between parents and children which successfully
defeat the children's attempts to make other adjust-
ments, of necessary choices made unnecessarily poignant
because they become Issues in an intense emotional rela-
tionship. Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay
for a ^ecialisation of emotion which might be brought
about in other ways, notably through coeducation.
And with such a question in our minds it is interesting
to note that a larger family community, in which there

[212]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the
child against the development of the crippling attitudes^ *
which have been labelled CEdipus complexes, Electra
complexes, and so on.

The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to
channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents
and suggests that while we would reject that part of
the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the
segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn
from a picture in which the home does not dominate
and distort the life of the child.

The presence of many strongly held and contradic-
tory points of view and the enormous influence of indi-
viduals in the lives of their children in our country play
into each other's hands in producing situations fraught
with emotion and pain. \In Samoa the fact that one
girl's father is a domineering, dogmatic person, her
cousin's father a gentle, reasonable person, and another
cousin's father a vivid, brilliant, eccentric person, will
influence the three girls in only one respect, choice of ^'
residence if any one of the three fathers is the head of a
household. But the attitudes of the three girls towards
sex, and towards religion, will not be affected by the
different temperaments of their three fathers, for the
fathers play too slight a role in their lives. A They are
schooled not by an individual but by an army of rela-
tives into a general conformity upon which the per-
sonality of their parents has a very slight effect. And
through an endless chain of cause and effect, individual

[213]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

differences of standard are not perpetuated through the
children's adherence to the parents' position, nor are
children thrown into bizarre, untypical attitudes which

r might form the basis for departure and change. It is
, possible that where our own culture is so charged with
choke, it would be desirable to mitigate, at least in some
slight measure, the strong role which parents play in
children's lives, and so eliminate one of the most pow-
erful accidental factors In the choices of any individual
life.

/ The Samoan parent would reject as unseemly and
odious an ethical plea made to a child in terms of per-
sonal affection. "Be good to please mother." "Go to
church for father's sake." "Don't be so disagreeable to
your sister, it makes father so unhappy." Where there
is one standard of conduct and only one, such undig-
nified confusion of ethics and affection is blessedly
eliminated. )But where there are many standards and
all adults are striving desperately to bind their own
children to the particular courses which they themselves
have chosen, recourse is had to devious and non-repu-
table means. Beliefs, practices, courses of action, are
pressed upon the child in the name of filial loyalty. In
our ideal picture of the freedom of the individual and
the dignity of human relations it is not pleasant to
realise that we have developed a form of family or-
ganisation which often cripples the emotional life, and
warps and confuses the growth of many individuals'
power to consciously live their own lives.

[214]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

The third element in the Samoan pattern of lack of
personal relationships and lack of speci_alised affection,
is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals
are placed in categories and the response is to the cate-
gory, "relative," or "wife of my husband's talking
chief," or "son of my father's talking chief," or
"daughter of my father's talking chief." ^^Considera-
tion of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed
out in favour of regimented associations.^ Such atti-
tudes we would of course reject completelv. ^ ^^

f SJ Li ■■

Drawing the threads of this particular discussion to-
gether, we may say that one striking difference between
Samoan society and our own is the lack of the specialisa- /h
tion of feeling, and particularly of sex feeling^ among ^
Ihe Samoans. To this difference is uncfoubtedly due
a part of the lack of difficulty of marital adjustments
in a marriage of convenience, and the lack of frigidity
or psychic impotence. This lack of specmlisation_ of
feeling must be attributed to l:he large_heterog;eneous
household, the segregation of the sexes before adoles-
cence, and the reg^imen^tation _af _friendship — chiefly
along relationship lines. And yet, altTiough we de-
plore the prices.Jn maladjusted and frustrated lives,
which we. must pay for the greater specialisation of sex
feeling in our own society, we nevertheless vote the
development of specialised response as a gain which
we would not relinquish. But an examination of these
three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish
our desired end, the development of a consciousness of

[215]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

personality, through coeducation and free and un-
regirner^djEriendships, and possibly do away with the
evils inherent in the too intimate family organisation,
thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjust-

^jnent without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.

, f^yThe next great difference between Samoa and our own
culture which may be credited with a lower production
of maladjusted individuals is the difference in the atti-
tude towards sex and the education of the children In
matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the
facts of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children,
no child has to conceal its knowledge for fear of punish-
ment or ponder painfully over little-understood occur-
rences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge, faulty
speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which
may have far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare
physical facts of sex without a knowledge of the accom-
panying excitement, of the fact of birth without the pains
of labour, of the fact of death without the fact of cor-
ruption — all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of
sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth —
are absent In Samoa. Furthermore, the Samoan child
who participates intimately In the lives of a host of
relatives has many and varied experiences upon which

" to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined
within one family circle (and such confinement is be-
coming more and more frequent with the growth of
cities and the substitution of apartment houses with a
transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-

[216]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

holders), often owe their only experience with birth or
death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the
death of a parent or grandparent. Their knowledge of
sex, aside from children's gossip, comes from an acci-
dental glimpse of parental activity. This has several
very obvious disadvantages. In the first place, the child
is dependent for its knowledge upon birth and death
entering its own home 3 the youngest child in a family 1)

where there are no deaths may grow to adult life with- ^ ■
out ever having had any close knowledge of pregnancy, ' ''
experience with young children, or contact with death. -K

A host of ill-digested fragmentary conceptions of life
and death will fester in the ignorant, Inexperienced ,y
mind and provide a fertile field for the later growth ^0

of unfortunate attitudes. Second, such children draw
their experiences from too emotionally toned a field j
one birth may be the only one with which they come in
close contact for the first twenty years of their lives.
And upon the accidental aspects of this particular birth
their whole attitude is dependent. If the birth is that
of a younger child who usurps the elder's place, if
the mother dies In child bed, or if the child which Is
born is deformed, birth may seem a horrible thing,
fraught with only unwelcome consequences. If the
only death bed at which one has ever watched Is the
death bed of one's mother, the bare fact of death may
carry all the emotion which that bereavement aroused,
carry forever an effect out of all proportion to the par-
ticular deaths encountered later in life. And inter-

[217]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

course seen only once or twice, between relatives to-
wards whom the child has complicated emotional atti-
tudes, may produce any number of false assumptions.
Our records of maladjusted children are full of cases
where children have misunderstood the nature of the
sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied
by anger, or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror
from one highly charged experience. So our children
are dependent upon accident for their experience of
life and death j and those experiences which they are
vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so
are the worst possible way of learning general facts
about which it is important to acquire no special, dis-
torted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex ex-
perience, is a generous total for the child brought up
under living conditions which we consider consonant
with an American standard of living. And considering
the number of illustrations which we consider it neces-
sary to give of how to calculate the number of square
feet of paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by
twelve feet by fourteen feet, or how to parse an Eng-
lish sentence, this is a low standard of illustration. It
might be argued that these are experiences of such
high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It
might also be argued if a child were severely beaten
before being given its first lesson in calculating how to
paper a room, and as a sequel to the lesson, saw its
father hit its mother with the poker, it would always
remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would

[218]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

know about the real nature of the calculations involved
in room-papering is doubtful. In one or two experi-
ences, the child is given no perspective, no chance to
relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details
of the life process to their proper place. False impres-
sions, part impressions, repulsion, nausea, horror, grow
up about some fact experienced only once under intense
emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable to
the child's attaining any real understanding.

A standard of reticence which forbids the child any
sort of comment upon its experiences makes for the con-
tinuance of such false impressions, such hampering emo-
tional attitudes, questions such as, "Why were grand-
ma's lips so bluer" are promptly hushed. In Samoa,
where decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank,
naive repugnance to the odours of corruption on the
part of all the participants at a funeral robs the physical
aspect of death of any special significance. So, in our
arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his
experiences, and he is not permitted to discuss those
which he has had and correct his mistakes.

With the Samoan child it is profoundly different.
Intercourse, pregnancy, child birth, death, are all
familiar occurrences. And the Samoan child experi-
ences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were we
to decide for widening the child's experimental field,
would regard as essential. In a civilisation which sus-
pects privacy, children of neighbours will be accidental
and unemotional spectators in a house where the head

[219]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

of the household is dying or the wife is delivered of a
miscarriage. The pathology of the life processes is
known to them, as well as the normal. One impression
corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents,
to think about life and death and emotion without undue
preoccupation with the purely physical details.

It must not be supposed, however, that the mere
exposure of children to scenes of birth and death would
be a sufficient guarantee against the growth of unde-
sirable attitudes. Probably even more influential than
the facts which are so copiously presented to them, is
the attitude of mind with which their elders regard the
matter. To them, birth and sex and death are the
natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence
in which they expect their youngest children to share.
Our so often repeated comment that "it's not natural"
for children to be permitted to encounter death would
seem as Incongruous to them as if we were to say it
was not natural for children to see other people eat or
sleep. 'And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of
their children's presence envelops the children in a pro-
tective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds
them closer to the common emotion which is so digni-
. fiedly permitted them^)
\\j As in every case, it is here impossible to separate
' attitude from practice and say which is primary. The
distinction is made only for our use in another civilisa-
tion. The individual American parents, who believe
in a practice like the Samoan, and permit their children

[220]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

to see adult human bodies and gain a wider experience
of the functioning of the human body than is commonly
permitted in our civilisation, are building upon sand.
For the child, as soon as it leaves the protecting circle •
of its home, is blasted by an attitude which regards such y
experience in children as ugly and unnatural. As likely \
as not, the attempt of the individual parents will have '
done the child more harm than good, for the necessary
supporting social attitude is lacking. This is just a
further example of the possibilities of maladjustment
inherent in a society where each home differs from each
other home J for it is in the fact of difference that the «
strain lies rather than in the nature of the difference.

Upon this quiet acceptance of the physical facts of
life, the Samoans build, as they grow older, an accept-
ance of sex. Here again it is necessary to sort out which
parts of their practice seem to produce results which we
certainly deprecate, and which produce results which
we desire. It is possible to analyse Samoan sex practice
from the standpoint of development of personal rela-
tionships on the one hand, and of the obviation of
specific difficulties upon the other. f

We have seen that the Samoans have a low level of
appreciation of personality differences, and a poverty
of conception of personal relations. To such an atti- >
tude the acceptance of promiscuity undoubtedly con-
tributes. The contemporaneousness of several experi-
ences, their short duration, the definite avoidance of "
forming any affectional ties, the blithe acceptance of the

[221]

A

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

dictates of a favourable occasion, as in the expectation of
infidelity in any wife whose husband is long from home,
all serve to make sex an end rather than a means, some-
thing which is valued in itself, and deprecated inasmuch
as it tends to bind one individual to another. Whether
such a disregard of personal relations is completely con-
tingent upon the sex habits of the people is doubtful.
Itf'probably is also a reflection of a more general cul-
tural attitude in which personality is consistently disre-
garded. ; But there is one respect in which these very
practices make possible a recognition of personality
which is often denied to many in our civilisation, be-
cause, from the Samoans' complete knowledge of ^sex^
its possibilities and its rewards, they are able to count it
at its true value. And if they have no preference for re-
serving sex activity for important relationships, neither
do they regard relationships as important because they
are productive of sex satisfaction. The Samoan girl who
shrugs her shoulder over the excellent technique of
^ some young Lothario is nearer to the recognition of
sex as an impersonal force without any intrinsic valid-
ity, than is the sheltered American girl who falls in
love with the first man who kisses her. From their
familiarity with the reverberations which accompany
sex excitement comes this recognition of the essential
impersonality of sex attraction which we may well
envy themj from the too slight, too casual practice
comes the disregard of personality which seems to us
' unlovely.

[222]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

The fashion in which their sex practice reduces the
possibility of neuroses has already been discussed.^ By
discounting our category of perversion, as applied to
practice, and reserving it for the occasional psychic per-
vert, they legislate a whole field of neurotic possibility
out of existence. Onanism, homosexuality, statistically
unusual forms of heterosexual activity, are neither
banned nor institutionalised. The wider range which
these practices give prevents the development of obses-
sions of guilt which are so frequent a cause of malad-
justment among us. The more varied practices per-
mitted heterosexually preserve any individual from
being penalised for special conditioning. This accept- |
an£e_o£jajffiid£r..range as,."normal" provides a cultural/!
atmosphere in which frigidity and psychic impotence do /
not occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment inf
marriage can always be established. —The acceptancej
of such an attitude without in any way accepting pro-
miscuity would go a long way towards solving many
marital impasses and emptying our park benches and
our houses of prostitution.

Among the factors in the Samoan scheme of life J
which are influential in producing stable, well-adjusted,
robust individualsjv the organisation of the family and
the attitude towards sex are undoubtedly the most im-
.^^^portantr) But it is necessary to note also the general
^3^educational concept which disapproves of precocity and
coddles the slow, the laggard, the inept. In a society
where the tempo of life was faster, the rewards greater,

[223]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

the amount of energy expended larger, the bright chil-
dren might develop symptoms of boredom. But the
slower pace dictated by the climate, the complacent,
peaceful society, and the c.Q0ap£a§gfeQ4^ SiL th& iaiKSi
in its blatant precocious display of individuality which
drains off some of the discontent which the bright child
feels, prevent any child from becoming too bored.
And the dullard is not goaded and dragged along
faster than he is able until, sick with making an im-
possible effort, he gives up entirely. This educational
policy also tends to blur individual differences and so
to minimise jealousy, rivalry, emulation, those social
attitudes which arise out of discrepancies of endowment
and are so far-reaching in their efiFects upon the adult
personality.

It is one way of solving the problem of differences
between individuals and a method of solution exceed-
ingly congenial to a strict adult world. The longer the
child is kept in a subject, non-initiating state, the more
I of the general cultural attitude it will absorb, the less
i' of a disturbing element it will become. Furthermore,
if time is given them, the dullards can learn enough
to provide a stout body of conservatives upon whose
shoulders the burden of the civilisation can safely rest.
Giving titles to young men would put a premium upon
the exceptional J giving titles to men of forty, who
have at last acquired sufficient training to hold them,
assures the continuation of the usual. It also discour-
ages the brilliant so that their social contribution is
slighter than it might otherwise have been.

[224]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

We are slowly feeling our way towards a solution
of this problem, ac least in the case of formal educa-
tion. LTntil very recently our educational system of-
fered only two very partial solutions of the difficulties
inherent in a great discrepancy between children of
different endowment and different rates of develop-
ment. One solution was to allow a sufficiently long
time to each educational step so that all but the men-
tally defective could succeed, a method similar to the
Samoan one and without its compensatory dance floor.
The bright child, held back, at intolerably boring tasks,
unless he was fortunate enough to find some other out-
let for his unused energy, was likely to expend it upon
truancy and general delinquency. Our only alterna-
tive to this was "skipping" a child from one grade to
another, relying upon the child's superior intelligence
to bridge the gaps. This was a method congenial to
American enthusiasm for meteoric careers from canal
boat and log cabin to the White House. Its disad-
vantages in giving the child a sketchy, discontinuous
background, in removing it from its age group, have
been enumerated too often to need repetition here. But
it is worthy of note that with a very different valuation
of individual ability than that entertained by Samoan
society we used for years one solution, similar and
less satisfactory than theirs, in our formal educational
attempts.

The methods which experimental educators are sub-
stituting for these unsatisfactory solutions, schemes like
the Dalton Plan, or the rapidly moving classes in

[225]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

which a group of children can move ahead at a high,
even rate of speed without hurt to themselves or to
their duller fellows, is a striking example of the re-
sults of applying reason to the institutions of our so-
ciety. The old red school-house was almost as hap-
hazard and accidental a phenomenon as the Samoan
dance floor. It was an institution which had grown
up in response to a vaguely felt, unanalysed need.
Its methods were analogous to the methods used by
primitive peoples, non-rationalised solutions of press-
ing problems. But the institutionalisation of different
methods of education for children of different capaci-
ties and different rates of development is not like any-
thing which we find in Samoa or in any other primi-
tive society. It is the conscious, intelligent directing
of human institutions in response to observed human
needs.
^ Still another factor in Samoan education which re-
' suits in different attitudes is the place of work and play
in the children's lives. Samoan children do not learn
to work through learning to play, as the children of
many primitive peoples do. Nor are they permitted a
•/ period of lack of responsibility such as our children
are allowed. From the time they are four or five
years old they perform definite tasks, graded to their
strength and intelligence, but still tasks which have a
meaning in the structure of the whole society. This
does not mean that they have less time for play than
American children who are shut up in schools from

[226]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

nine to three o'clock every day. Before the introduc-
tion of schools to complicate the ordered routine of
their lives, the time spent by the Samoan child in run-
ning errands, sweeping the house, carrying water, and
taking actual care of the baby, was possibly less ^than
that which the American school child devotes to her
studies.

The difference lies not in the proportion of time in
which their activities are directed and the proportion
in which they are free, but rather in the difference of
attitude. With the professionalisation of education and
the specialisation of industrial tasks which has stripped
the individual home of its former variety of activities,
our children are not made to feel that the time they
do devote to supervised activity is functionally related
to the world of adult activity. Although this lack of
connection is more apparent than real, it is still suffi-
ciently vivid to be a powerful determinant in the child's
attitude. The Samoan girl who tends babies, carries
water, sweeps the floor j or the little boy who digs for
bait, or collects cocoanuts, has no such difficulty. The
necessary nature of their tasks is obvious. jAnd the ».
practice of giving a child a task which he can do well
and never permitting a childish, inefficient tinkering
with adult apparatus, such as we permit to our chil-
dren, who bang aimlessly and destructively on their
fathers' typewriters, results in a different attitude to^
wards work.'^ American children spendTiours in schools
learning tasks whose visible relation to their mothers'

[227]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

and fathers' activities is often quite impossible to rec-
ognise. Their participation in adults' activities is either
in terms of toys, tea-sets and dolls and toy automobiles,
or else a meaningless and harmful tampering with the
electric light system. (It must be understood that
here, as always, when I say American, I do not mean
those Americans recently arrived from Europe, who
still present a different tradition of education. Such
a group would be the Southern Italians, who still ex-
pect productive work from their children.)
I So our children make a false set of categories, work,
play, and school j work for adults, play for children's
1 pleasure, and schools as an inexplicable nuisance with
I some compensations. These false distinctions are likely
to produce all sorts of strange attitudes, an apathetic
treatment of a school which bears no known relation
to life, a false dichotomy between work and play, which
may result either in a dread of work as implying irk-
some responsibility or in a later contempt for play as
childish.

The Samoan child's dichotomy is different. Work
» consists of those necessary tasks which keep the social
life going: planting and harvesting and preparation of
food, fishing, house-building, mat-making, care of chil-
dren, collecting of property to validate marriages and
births and succession to titles and to entertain strangers,
these are the necessary activities of life, activities in
which every member of the community, down to the
' smallest child, has a part. Work is not a way of ac-

[228]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

quiring leisure j where every household produces its
own food and clothes and furniture, where there is no
large amount of fixed capital and households of high
rank are simply characterised by greater industry in the
discharge of greater obligations, our whole picture of
saving, of investment, of deferred enjoyment, is com-
pletely absent. (There is even a lack of clearly defined
seasons of harvest, which would result in special abun-
dance of food and consequent feasting. Food is always
abundant, except in some particular village where a
few weeks of scarcity may follow a period of lavish
entertaining.) Rather, work is something which goes
on all the time for every onej no one is exempt j few
are overworked. There is social reward for the indus-
trious, social toleration for the man who does barely
enough. And there is always leisure — leisure, be it
noted, which is not.the result of hard work or accumu-
lated capital at all, but is merely the result of a kindly
climate, a small population, a well-integrated social
system, and no social demands for spectacular expendi-
ture. And play is what one does with the time left
over from working, a way of filling in the wide spaces
in a structure of unirksome work.

Play includes dancing, singing, games, weaving neck-
laces of flowers, flirting, repartee, all forms of sex ac-
tivity. And there are social institutions like the cere-
monial inter-village visit which partake of both work
and play. But the distinctions between work as some-
thing one has to do but dislikes, and play as something

[229]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

one wants to do ; of work as the main business of adults,
play as the main concern of children, are conspicuously
absent. Children's play is like adults' play in kind,
interest, and in its proportion to work. And the Sa-
moan child has no desire to turn adult activities into
play, to translate one sphere into the other. I had a
box of white clay pipes for blowing soap bubbles sent
me. The children were familiar with soap bubbles, but
their native method of blowing them was very inferior
to the use of clay pipes. But after a few minutes' de-
light in the unusual size and beauty of the soap bub-
bles, one little girl after another asked me if she might
please take her pipe home to her mother, for pipes
were meant to smoke, not to play with. Foreign dolls
did not interest them, and they have no dolls of their
own, although children of other islands weave dolls
from the palm leaves from which Samoan children
weave balls. They never make toy houses, nor play
house, nor sail toy boats. Little boys would climb into
a real outrigger canoe and practise paddling it within
the safety of the lagoon. This whole attitude gave a
greater coherence to the children's lives than we often
afford our children.

The Intelligibility of a child's life among us Is meas-
ured only In terms of the behaviour of other children.
If all the other children go to school the child who
does not feels Incongruous In their midst. If the little
girl next door Is taking music lessons, why can't Maryj
or why must Mary take music lessons, if the other lit-

[230]

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

tie girl doesn't take them. But so sharp is our sense
of difference between the concerns of children and of
adults that the child does not learn to judge its own
behaviour in relationship to adult life. So children
often learn to regard play as something inherently un-
dignified, and as adults mangle pitifully their few
moments of leisure. But the Samoan child measures
her every act of work or play in terms of her whole
community J each item of conduct is dignified in terms
of its realised relationship to the only standard she
knows, the life of a Samoan village. So complex and
stratified a society as ours cannot hope to develop spon-
taneously any such simple scheme of education. Again
we will be hard put to it to devise ways of participation
for children, and means of articulating their school life
with the rest of life which will give them the same
dignity which Samoa affords her children.

..Last among the cultural differences which may in-
fluence the emotional stability of the child is the lack
of pressure to make important choices. Children are
urged to learn, urged to behave, urged to work, but
they are not urged to hasten in the choices which they
make themselves. The first point at which this atti-
tude makes itself felt is in the matter of the brother
and sister taboo, a cardinal point of modesty and de-
cency. Yet the exact stage at which the taboo should
be observed is always left to the younger child. When
it reaches a point of discretion, of understanding, it
will of itself feel "ashamed" and establish the formal

[231]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

barrier which will last until old age. Likewise, sex
activity is never urged upon the young people, nor
marriage forced upon them at a tender age. Where
the possibilities of deviation from the accepted standard
are so slight, a few years leeway holds no threat for
the society. The child who comes later to a realisa-
tion of the brother and sister taboo really endangers
nothing.

This laissez faire attitude has been carried over into
the Samoan Christian Church. The Samoan saw no
reason why young unmarried people should be pressed
to make momentous decisions which would spoil part
of their fun in life. Time enough for such serious
matters after they were married or later still, when
they were quite sure of what steps they were taking
and were in less danger of falling from grace every
month or so. The missionary authorities, realising the
virtues of going slowly and sorely vexed to reconcile
Samoan sex ethics with a Western European code, saw
the great disadvantages of unmarried Church members
who were not locked up in Church schools. Conse-
quently, far from urging the adolescent to think upon
her soul the native pastor advises her to wait until she
is older, which she is only too glad to do.

But, especially in the case of our Protestant churches,
there is a strong preference among us for the appeal
to youth. The Reformation, with its emphasis upon
individual choice, was unwilling to accept the tacit
habitual Church membership which was the Catholic

[232]

I

OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

pattern, a membership marked by additional sacra-
mental gifts but demanding no sudden conversion, no
renewal of religious feeling. But the Protestant solu-
tion is to defer the choice only so far as necessary, and
the moment the child reaches an age which may be
called "years of discretion" it makes a strong, dramatic
appeal. This appeal is reinforced by parental and
social pressure 3 the child is bidden to choose now and
wisely. While such a position in the churches which
stem from the Reformation and its strong emphasis on
individual choice was historically inevitable, it is regret-
table that the convention has lasted so long. It has
even been taken over by non-sectarian reform groups,
all of whom regard the adoles cent child as the mos t
legitimate field . of . act i vity.

In all of these comparisons between Samoan and
American culture, many points are useful only in
throwing a spotlight upon our own solutions, while in
others it is possible to find suggestions for change.
Whether or not we envy other peoples one of their
solutions, our attitude towards our own solutions must
be greatly broadened and deepened by a consideration
of the way in which other peoples have met the same
problems. Realising that our own ways are not hu- '
manly inevitable nor God-ordained, but are the fruit \
of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine
in turn all of our institutions, thrown into strong relief
against the history of other civilisations, and weighing
them in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.

XIV

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

WE have been comparing point for point, our civili-
sation and the simpler civilisation of Samoa, in order
to illuminate our own methods of education. If now
we turn from the Samoan picture and take away only
the main lesson which we learned there, that adoles-
cence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but
that cultural conditions make it so, can we draw any
conclusions which might bear fruit In the training of
our adolescents?
\ At first blush the answer seems simple enough. If
. adolescents are only plunged into difficulties and dis-
tress because of conditions in their social environment,
then by all means let us so modify that environment
as to reduce this stress and eliminate this strain and
anguish of adjustment. But, unfortunately, the condi-
tions which vex our adolescents are the flesh and bone
of our society, no more subject to straightforward
manipulation upon our part than is the language which
we speak. We can alter a syllable here, a construction
there J but the great and far-reaching changes in lin-
guistic structure (as in all parts of culture) are the
work of time, a work in which each individual plays
an unconscious and inconsiderable part. The principal

[234]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

causes of our adolescents' difficulty are the presence of
conflicting standards and the belief that every indi-
vidual should make his or her own choices, coupled
with a feeling that choice is an important matter. Given!
these cultural attitudes, adolescence, regarded now not
as a period of physiological change, for we know that
physiological puberty need not produce conflict, but as
the beginning of mental and emotional maturity, is
bound to be filled with conflicts and difliculties. A so-
ciety which is clamouring for choice, which is filled
with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand
of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy,
will give each new generation no peace until all have
chosen or^one under, unable to bear the conditions of
choice. The stress is in our civilisation, not in the
physical changes through which our children pass^.but it
is none the less real nor the less inevitable in twentieth-
century America.

And if we look at the particular forms which this
need for choice takes, the difliculty of the adolescent's
position is only documented further. Because the dis-
cussion is principally concerned with girls, I shall dis-
cuss the problem from the girls' point of view, but in
many respects the plight of the adolescent boy is very
similar. Between fourteen and eighteen, the average
American boy and girl finish school. They are now
ready to go to work and must choose what type of
work they wish to do. It might be argued that they
often have remarkably little choice. Their education.

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

the part of the country in which they live, their skill
with their hands, will combine to dictate choice perhaps
between the job of cash girl in a department store or
of telephone operator, or of clerk or miner. But small
as Is the number of choices open to them in actuality,
the significance of this narrow field of opportunity is
blurred by our American theory of endlejs_possibilides.
Moving pictufeTlfiagazine, newspaper, all reiterate the
Cinderella story in one form or another, and often the
interest lies as much in the way cash girl 456 becomes
head buyer as in her subsequent nuptials with the
owner of the store. Our occupational classes are not
fixed. So many children are better educated and hold
more skilled positions than their parents that even the
ever-present discrepancy between opportunities open to
men and opportunities open to women, although pres-
ent in a girl's competition with her brother, is often
absent as between her unskilled father and herself. It
is needless to argue that these attitudes are products
of conditions which no longer exist, particularly the
presence of a frontier and a large amount of free land
which provided a perpetual alternative of occupational
choice. A set which was given to our thinking in pio-
neer days is preserved in other terms. As long as we
have immigrants from non-English-speaking countries,
the gap in opportunities between non-English-speaking
parents and English-speaking children will be vivid and
dramatic. Until our standard of education becomes far
more stable than it is at present, the continual raising

[236]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

of the age and grade until which schooling is compul-
sory ensures a wide educational gap between many par-
ents and their children. And occupational shifts like
the present movements of farmers and farm workers
into urban occupations, give the same picture. When
the agricultural worker pictures urban work as a step
up in the social scale, and the introduction of scientific
farming is so radically reducing the numbers needed
in agriculture, the movement of young people born on
the farm to city jobs is bound to dazzle the imagina-
tion of our farming states during the next generation
at least. The substitution of machines for unskilled
workers and the absorption of many of the workers
and their children into positions where they manipulate
machines affords another instance of the kind of his-
torical change which keeps our myth of endless oppor-
tunity alive. Add to these special features, like the
eifect upon the prospects of Negro children of the tre-
mendous exodus from the southern corn fields, or upon
the children of New England mill-hands who are de-
prived of an opportunity to follow dully in their par-
ents' footsteps and must at least seek new fields if not
better ones.

Careful students of the facts may tell us that class \
lines are becoming fixed j that while the children of
immigrants make advances beyond their parents, they
move up in stepj that there are fewer spectacular suc-
cesses among them than there used to bej that it is
much more possible to predict the future status of the

[237]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

child from the present status of the parent. But this
measured comment of the statistician has not filtered
into our literature, nor our moving pictures, nor in any
way served to minimise the vividness of the improve-
ment in the children's condition as compared with the
condition of their parents. Especially in cities, there is
no such obvious demonstration of the fact that im-
provement is the rule for the children of a given class
or district, and not merely a case of John Riley's mak-
ing twenty dollars a week as a crossing man while Mary,
his daughter, who has gone to business school, makes
twenty-five dollars a week, working shorter hours.
The lure of correspondence school advertising, the
efflorescence of a doctrine of short-cuts to fame, all
contrive to make an American boy or girl's choice of
a job different from that of English children, born
into a society where stratification is so old, so institu-
tionalised, that the dullest cannot doubt it. So eco-
nomic conditions force them to go to work and every-
thing combines to make that choice a difficult one,
whether in terms of abandoning a care-free existence
for a confining, uncongenial one, or in terms of bitter
rebellion against the choice which they must make in
contrast to the opportunities which they are told are
open to all Americans.

And taking a job introduces other factors of difficulty
into the adolescent girl's home situation. Her depend-
ence has always been demonstrated in terms of limits
and curbs set upon her spontaneous activity in every

[238]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

field from spending money to standards of dress and
behaviour. Because of the essentially pecuniary nature
of our society, the relationship of limitation in terms
of allowance to limitation of behaviour are more far-
reaching than in earlier times. Parental disapproval
of extreme styles of clothing would formerly have
expressed itself in a mother's making her daughter's
dresses high in the neck and long in the sleeve. Now
it expresses itself in control through money. If Mary
doesn't stop purchasing chiffon stockings, Mary shall
have no money to buy stockings. Similarly, a taste for
cigarettes and liquor can only be gratified through
money J going to the movies, buying books and maga-
zines of which her parents disapprove, are all depend-
ent upon a girl's having the money, as well as upon
her eluding more direct forms of control. And the
importance of a supply of money in gratifying all of
a girl's desires for clothes and for amusement makes
money the easiest channel through which to exert pa-
rental authority. So easy is it, that the threat of cut-
ting off an allowance, taking away the money for the
one movie a week or the coveted hat, has taken the
place of the whippings and bread-and-water exiles
which were favourite disciplinary methods in the last
century. The parents come to rely upon this method
of control. The daughters come to see all censoring
of their behaviour, moral, religious or social, the eth-
ical code and the slightest sumptuary provisions in
terms of an economic threat. And then at sixteen or

[239]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

seventeen the daughter gets a job. No matter how
conscientiously she may contribute her share to the
expenses of the household, it is probably only in homes
where a European tradition still lingers that the wage-
earning daughter gives all of her earning to her par-
ents. (This, of course, excludes the cases where the
daughter supports her parents, where the vesting of
the economic responsibility in her hands changes the
picture of parental control in another fashion.) For
the first time in her life, she has an income of her own,
with no strings of morals or of manners attached to its
use. Her parents' chief instrument of discipline is
shattered at one blow, but not their desire to direct
their daughters' lives. They have not pictured their
exercise of control as the right of those who provide,
to control those for whom they provide. They have
pictured it in far more traditional terms, the right of
parents to control their children, an attitude reinforced
by years of practising such control.

But the daughter is in the position of one who has
yielded unwillingly to some one who held a whip in
his hand, and now sees the whip broken. Her unwill-
ingness to obey, her chafing under special parental re-
strictions which children accept as inevitable in simpler
cultures, is again a feature of our conglomerate civili-
sation. When all the children in the community go to
bed at curfew, one child is not as likely to rail against
her parents for enforcing the rule. But when the little
girl next door is allowed to stay up until eleven o'clock,

[240]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

why must Mary go to bed at eight? If all of her com-
panions at school are allowed to smoke, why can't she?
And conversely, for it is a question of the absence of
a common standard far more than of the nature of the
standards, if all the other little girls are given lovely
fussy dresses and hats with flowers and ribbons, why
must she be dressed in sensible, straight linen dresses
and simple round hats? Barring an excessive and pas-
sionate devotion of the children to their parents, a de-
votion of a type which brings other more serious diffi-
culties in its wake, children in a heterogeneous civili-
sation will not accept unquestioningly their parents'
judgment, and the most obedient will temper present
compliance with the hope of future emancipation.

In a primitive, homogenous community, disciplinary
measures of parents are expended upon securing small
concessions from children, in correcting the slight de-
viations which occur within one pattern of behaviour.
But in our society, home discipline is used to establish
one set of standards as over against other sets of stand-
ards,; each family group is fighting some kind of battle,
bearing the onus of those who follow a middle course,
stoutly defending a cause already lost in the commu-
nity at large, or valiantly attempting to plant a new
standard far in advance of their neighbours. This
propagandist aspect greatly increases the importance of
home discipline in the development of a girPs person-
ality. So we have the picture of parents, shorn of their
economic authority, trying to coerce the girl who still

[241]

J

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

lives beneath their roof into an acceptance of standards
against which she is rebelling. In this attempt they
often find themselves powerless and as a result the
control of the home breaks down suddenly, and breaks
down just at the point where the girl, faced with other
important choices, needs a steadying home environ-
ment.

It is at about this time that sex begins to play a role
in the girPs life, and here also conflicting choices are
presented to her. If she chooses the freer standards
of her own generation, she comes in conflict with her
parents, and perhaps more importantly with the ideals
which her parents have instilled. The present problem
of the sex experimentation of young people would be
greatly simplified if it were conceived of as experi-
mentation instead of as rebellion, if no Puritan self-
accusations vexed their consciences. The introduction of
an experimentation so much wider and more dangerous
presents sufficient problems in our lack of social canons
for such behaviour. For a new departure in the field
of personal relations is always accompanied by the
failure of those who are not strong enough to face an
unpatterned situation. Canons of honour, of personal
obligation, of the limits of responsibilities, grow up
only slowly. And, of first experimenters, many perish
in uncharted seas. But when there is added to the pit-
falls of experiment, the suspicion that the experiment
is wrong and the need for secrecy, lying, fear, the
strain is so great that frequent downfall is inevitable.

[242]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

And if the girl chooses the other course, decides to
remain true to the tradition of the last generation, she
wins the sympathy and support of her parents at the
expense of the comradeship of her contemporaries.
Whichever way the die falls, the choice is attended by
mental anguish. Only occasional children escape by
various sorts of luck, a large enough group who have
the same standards so that they are supported either
against their parents or against the majority of their
age mates, or by absorption in some other interest.
But, with the exception of students for whom the prob-
lem of personal relations is sometimes mercifully de-
ferred for a later settlement, those who find some
other interest so satifying that they take no interest in
the other sex, often find themselves old maids without
any opportunity to recoup their positions. The fear
of spinsterhood is a fear which shadows the life of
no primitive woman j it is another item of maladjust-
ment which our civilisation has produced.

To the problem of present conduct are added all the
perplexities introduced by varying concepts of mar- •
riage, the conflict between deferring marriage until a
competence is assured, or marrying and sharing the
expenses of the home with a struggling young husband.
The knowledge of birth control, while greatly digni-
fying human life by introducing the element of choice
at the point where human beings have before been
most abjectly subject to nature, introduces further
perplexities. It complicates the issue from a straight \

[243]

s

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

marriage-home-and-children plan o£ life versus inde-
pendent spinsterhood by permitting marriages without
children, earlier marriages, marriages and careers, sex
relations without marriage and the responsibility of a
home. And because the majority of girls still wish to
marry and regard their occupations as stop-gaps, these
problems not only influence their attitude towards men,
but also their attitude towards their work, and prevent
them from having a sustained interest in the work
which they are forced to do.

Then we must add to the difficulties inherent in a
new economic status and the necessity of adopting some
standard of sex relations, ethical and religious issues
to be solved. Here again the home is a powerful fac-
tor j the parents use every ounce of emotional pressure
to enlist their children in one of the dozen armies of
salvation. The stress of the revival meeting, the pres-
sure of pastor and parent gives them no peace. And
the basic difficulties of reconciling the teachings of au-
thority with the practices of society and the findings
of science, all trouble and perplex children already
harassed beyond endurance.

Granting that society presents too many problems
to her adolescents, demands too many momentous de-
cisions on a few months' notice, what is to be done
about it? One panacea suggested would be to postpone
at least some of the decisions, keep the child econom-
ically dependent, or segregate her from all contact with
the other sex, present her with only one set of religious

[244]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

ideas until she is older, more poised, better able to deal
critically with the problems which will confront her.
In a less articulate fashion, such an idea is back of
various schemes for the prolongation of youth, through
raising the working age, raising the school age, shield-
ing school children from a knowledge of contro-
versies like evolution versus fundamentalism, or any
knowledge of sex hygiene or birth control. Even if
such measures, specially initiated and legislatively en-
forced, could accomplish the end which they seek and
postpone the period of choice, it is doubtful whether
such a development would be desirable. It is unfair
that very young children should be the battleground
for conflicting standards, that their development should
be hampered by propagandist attempts to enlist and
condition them too young. It is probably equally un-
fair to culturally defer the decisions too late. Loss of
one's fundamental religious faith is more of a wrench
at thirty than at fifteen simply in terms of the number
of years of acceptance which have accompanied the
belief. A sudden knowledge of hitherto unsuspected
aspects of sex, or a shattering of all the old conventions
concerning sex behaviour, is more difficult just in terms
of the strength of the old attitudes. Furthermore, in
practical terms, such schemes would be as they are now,
merely local, one state legislating against evolution,
another against birth control, or one religious group
segregating its unmarried girls. And these special
local movements would simply unfit groups of young

[245]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

people for competing happily with children who had
been permitted to make their choices earlier. Such an
educational scheme, in addition to being almost impos-
sible of execution, would be a step backward and would
only beg the question.
|/ Instead, we must turn all of our educational efforts
,1 to training our children for the choices which will con-
■] front them. Education, in the home even more than
at school, instead of being a special pleading for one
regime, a desperate attempt to form one particular
habit of mind which will withstand all outside influ-
ences, must be a preparation for those very influences.
Such an education must give far more attention to
mental and physical hygiene than it has given hitherto.
The child who is to choose wisely must be healthy in
mind and body, handicapped in no preventable fashion.
^And even more importantly, this child of the future
/ must have an open mind. The home must cease to
1 plead an ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles
Uor frowns, caresses or threats. The children must be
/taught how to think, not what to think. And because
i / old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance,
/ just as to-day they are taught intolerance. They must
/ be taught that many ways are open to them, no one
— Sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them
and upon them alone lies the burden of choice. Un-
hampered by prejudices, unvexed by too early condi-
tioning to any one standard, they must come clear-eyed
to the choices which lie before them.

[246]

EDUCATION FOR CHOICE

For it must be realised by any_ studerit i)f civilisa-tion .

that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly -

changing civilisation j we pay in high proportions_ of ^/

crime and delinquency, we pay in the conflicts of youth,
we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we
pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which
the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such
a list of "prices, 'we must count our gains carefully, not
to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must
be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of
many possible ways of life, where other civilisations
have recognised only one. Where other civilisations
give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental
type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a
civilisation in which there are many standards ofFers a
possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of
many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts
and varying interests.

At the present time we live in a period of transition.
We have many standards but we still believe that only
one standard can be the right one. We present to our
children the picture of a battle-field where each group
is fully armoured in a conviction of the righteousness
of its cause. And each of these groups make forays
among the next generation. But it is unthinkable that
a final recognition of the great number of ways in
which man, during the course of history and at the
present time, is solving the problems of life, should
not bring with it in turn the downfall of our belief in

[247]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

a single standard. And when no one group claims
ethical sanction for its customs, and each group wel-
comes to its midst only those who are temperamentally
fitted for membership, then we shall have realised the
high point of individual choice and universal tolera-
tion which a heterogeneous culture and a heterogeneous
culture alone can attain. Samoa knows but one way of
life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have
the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free
to choose among them?

[248]

APPENDIX I

NOTES TO CHAPTERS

CHAPTER IV
Pages 43 to 45.

In the Samoan classification of relatives two principles, sex
and age, are of the most primary importance. Relationship
terms are never used as terms of address, a name or nickname
being used even to father or mother. Relatives of the same
age or within a year or two younger to five or ten years older
are classified as of the speaker's generation, and of the same
sex or of the opposite sex. Thus a girl will call her sister,
her aunt, her niece, and her female cousin who are nearly of
the same age, usoy and a boy will do the same for his brother,
uncle, nephew, or male cousin. For relationships between
siblings of opposite sex there are two terms, tuafafine and
tuaganey female relative of the same age group of a male, and
male relative of the same age group of a female. (The term
uso has no such subdivisions.)

The next most important term is applied to younger rela-
tives of either sex, the word tet. Whether a child is so classi-
fied by an older relative depends not so much on how many
years younger the child may be, but rather on the amount of
care that the elder has taken of it. So a girl will call a cousin
two years younger than herself her teiy if she has lived near by,
but an equally youthful cousin who has grown up in a distant
village until both are grown will be called uso. It is notable
that there is no term for elder relative. The terms usoy tufa-
fine and tuagane all carry the feeling of contemporaneousness,

[249]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

and if it is necessary to specify seniority, a qualifying adjective
must be used.

Tamay the term for father, is applied also to the matai of
a household, to an uncle or older cousin with whose authority
a younger person comes into frequent contact and also to a
much older brother who in feeling is classed with the parent
generation. Tina is used only a little less loosely for the
mother, aunts resident in the household, the wife of the matai
and only very occasionally for an older sister.

A distinction is also made in terminology between men's
terms and women's terms for the children. A woman will
say tama (modified by the addition of the suffixes tane and
fa fine y male and female) and a man will say ataliiy son and
afafinCy daughter. Thus a woman will say, "Losa is my
tama" specifying her sex only when necessary. But Losa's
father will speak of Losa as his afafine. The same usage is
followed in speaking to a man or to a woman of a child. All
of these terms are further modified by the addition of the
word, moniy real, when a blood sister or blood father or
mother is meant. The elders of the household are called
roughly matuay and a grandparent is usually referred to as the
toa^inuy the "old man" or olamatuay "old woman," adding
an explanatory clause if necessary. All other relatives are
described by the use of relative clauses, "the sister of the hus-
band of the sister of my mother," "the brother of the wife
of my brother," etc. There are no special terms for the in-
law group.

CHAPTER V

Neighbourhood Maps

Pages 60 to 65.

For the sake of convenience the households were numbered
in sequence from one end of each village to the other. The

[250]

APPENDIX I

houses did not stretch in a straight line along the beach, but
were located so unevenly that occasionally one house was di-
rectly behind another. A schematic linear representation will,
however, be sufficient to show the effect of location in the for-
mation of neighbourhood groups.

VILLAGE I

(The name of the girl will be placed under the number of
the household. Adolescent girls' names in capitals, girls' just
reaching puberty in lower case and the pre-adolescent children
in italics.)

I

2 3
Vala

4

LlTA

5 6

Maliu . Lust
Pola

7
Fitu

Ula

8
Lia

9
Fiva
Luna

10

II 12

13

14 15
Lota Pala
Vi

Pels

16

17
Tuna

18

19

20 21 22

LosA

23

24 25
Tulipa Masina

26

Mtna

Sona

27
Tina

28

TiTA
Sina
Elisa

29 30

Aso Selu
Suna Tol(

3
3

I 32

33

VILLAGE II

Siufaga

(Household 38 in Siufaga is adjacent to household i in
Luma. The two villages are geographically continuous but
socially they are separate units.)

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

123456
Vina Namu Lita *

TOLO TOLU

Lusina

7 8
Tulima

II 12 13

Tatala

21 22 23

Pulona Ipu Tasi

31 32 33

LuA Simina

14 15 16 17 il
Lilina Tino Mala

24 25

26
Tua

27 28

10

19 20

Lola *

29 30
Timu
Meta

34 35 36 37

38

Fala
So lata

VILLAGE III

Faleasao

(Faleasao was separated from Luma by a high cliff which
jutted out into the sea and made it necessary to take an inland
trail to get from one seaside village to the other. This was
about a twenty-minute walk from Tau. Faleasao children
were looked upon with much greater hostility and suspicion
than that which the children of Luma and Siufaga showed to
each other. The pre-adolescent children from this village are
not discussed by name and will be indicated by an x.)

I

23456

XXX Talo Ela

X X

7
Leta

8

9 10

II

12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

X

X MiNA MOANA

Sala

X Mata

X

X X

LUINA

* Girls to whom a change of residence made important differences,
see Chap. XI, "The Girl in Conflict."

[252]

APPENDIX I

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

CHAPTER IX

Pages 123 to 125.

The first person singular of the verb "to know," used in
the negative, has two forms:

Ta ilo (Contraction of Ta te le iloa)

I euphonic neg. know
particle
and

Ua le iloa a'u

Pres. neg. know I

Part.

The former of these expressions has a very different mean-
ing from the latter although linguistically they represent op-
tional syntactic forms, the second being literally, "I do not
know," while the first can best be rendered by the slang phrase,
"Search me." This "Search me" carries no implication of lack
of actual knowledge or information about the subject in ques-
tion but is merely an indication either of lack of interest or
unwillingness to explain. That the Samoans feel this distinc-
tion very clearly is shown by the frequent use of both forms
in the same sentence: Ta ilo ua le iloa a^u. "Search me, I
don't know."

Page 126.

Sample Character Sketches Given of Members of
Their Households by Adolescent Girls

(Literal translations from dictated texts)

I

He is an untitled man. He works hard on the plantation.
He is tall, thin and dark-skinned. He is not easily angered.

[253]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

He goes to work and comes again at night. He is a police-
man. He does work for the government. He is not filled
with unwillingness. He is attractive looking. He is not mar-
ried.

II

She is an old woman. She is very old. She is weak. She
is not able to work. She can only remain in the house. Her
hair is black. She is fat. She has elephantiasis in one leg.
She has no teeth. She is not irritable. She does not hate. She
is clever at weaving mats, fishing baskets and food trays.

Ill

She is strong and able to work. She goes inland. She
weeds and makes the oven and picks breadfruit and gathers
paper mulberry bark. She is kind. She is of good conduct.
She is clever at weaving baskets and mats and fine mats and
food trays, and painting tapa cloth and scraping and pounding
and pasting paper mulberry bark. She is short, black-haired
and dark-skinned. She is fat. She is good. If any one passes
by she is kindly disposed towards them and calls out, "Po'o
fea 'e te maliu i ai?" (a most courteous way of asking,
"Where are you going?")

IV

She is fat. She has long hair. She is dark-skinned. She is
blind in one eye. She is of good behaviour. She is clever at
weeding taro and weaving floor mats and fine mats. She is
short. She has borne children. There is a baby. She remains
in the house on some days and on other days she goes inland.
She also knows how to weave baskets.

He is a boy. His skin is dark. So is his hair. He goes to
the bush to work. He works on the taro plantation. He

[254]

APPENDIX I

likes every one. He is clever at weaving baskets. He sings
in the choir of the young men on Sunday. He likes very
much to consort with the girls. He was expelled from the
pastor's house.

VI

Portrait of herself

I am a girl. I am short. I have long hair. I love my
sisters and all the people. I know how to weave baskets and
fishing baskets and how to prepare paper mulberry bark. I
live in the house of the pastor.

vn

He is a man. He is strong. He goes inland and works
upon the plantation of his relatives. He goes fishing. He
goes to gather cocoanuts and breadfruit and cooking leaves
and makes the oven. He is tall. He is dark-skinned. He is
rather fat. His hair is short. He is clever at weaving bas-
kets. He braids the palm leaf thatching mats for the house.*
He is also clever at house-building. He is of good conduct
and has a loving countenance.

VIII

She is a woman. She can't work hard enough (to suit her-
self). She is also clever at weaving baskets and fine mats and
at bark cloth making. She also makes the ovens and clears
away the rubbish around the house. She keeps her house in
fine condition. She makes the fire. She smokes. She goes
fishing and gets octopuses and tu'itu'i (sea eggs) and comes
back and eats them raw. She is kind-hearted and of loving
countenance. She is never angry. She also loves her children.

* Women's work.

[255]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

IX

She is a woman. She has a son, is his name. She

is lazy. She is tall. She is thin. Her hair is long. She is
clever at weaving baskets, making bark cloth and weaving fine
mats. Her husband is dead. She does not laugh often. She
stays in the house some days and other days she goes inland.
She keeps everything clean. She lives well upon bananas. She
has a loving face. She is not easily out of temper. She makes
the oven.

X

She is the daughter of . She is a little girl about

my age. She is also clever at weaving baskets and mats and
fine mats and blinds and floor mats. She is good in school.
She also goes to get leaves and breadfruit. She also goes fish-
ing when the tide is out. She gets crabs and jelly fish. She
is very loving. She does not eat up all her food if others ask
her for it. She shows a loving face to all who come to her
house. She also spreads food for all visitors.

XI

Portrait of herself

I am clever at weaving mats and fine mats and baskets and
blinds and floor mats. I go and carry water for all of my
household to drink and for others also. I go and gather ba-
nanas and breadfruit and leaves and make the oven with my
sisters. Then we (herself and her sisters) go fishing to-
gether and then it is night.

CHAPTER X

Pages 132 to 133.

The children of this age already show a very curious exam-
ple of a phonetic self-consciousness in which they are almost

[256]

APPENDIX I

as acute and discriminating as their elders. When the mis-
sionaries reduced the language to writing, there was no k in
the language, the k positions in otlier Polynesian dialects being
filled in Samoan either with a ^ or a glottal stop. Soon after
the printing of the Bible, and the standardisation of Samoan
spelling, greater contact with Tonga introduced the k into the
spoken language of Savai'i and Upolu, displacing the ty but
not replacing the glottal stop. Slowly this intrusive usage
spread eastward over Samoa, the missionaries who controlled
the schools and the printing press fighting a dogged and losing
battle with the less musical k. To-day the t is the sound used
in the speech of the educated and in the church, still conven-
tionally retained in all spelling and used in speeches and on
occasions demanding formality. The Manu'a children who
had never been to the missionary boarding schools, used the k
entirely. But they had heard the t in church and at school
and were sufficiently conscious of the difference to rebuke me
immediately if I slipped into the colloquial ky which was their
only speech habit, uttering the t sound for perhaps the first
time in their lives to illustrate the correct pronunciation from
which I, who was ostensibly learning to speak correctly, must
not deviate. Such an ability to disassociate the sound used
from the sound heard is remarkable in such very young chil-
dren and indeed remarkable in any person who is not lin-
guistically sophisticated.

CHAPTER XI

Pages i6i to 163.

During six months I saw six girls leave the pastor's estab-
lishment for several reasons: Tasi, because her mother was
ill and she, that rare phenomenon, the eldest in a biological
household, was needed at home; Tua, because she had come
out lowest in the missionaries' annual examination which her

[257]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

mother attributed to favouritism on the part of the pastor;
Luna, because her stepmother, whom she disliked, left her
father and thus made her home more attractive and because
under the influence of a promiscuous older cousin she began
to tire of the society of younger girls and take an interest in
love affairs; Lita, because her father ordered her home, be-
cause with the permission of the pastor, but without consult-
ing her family, she went off for a three weeks' visit in an-
other island. Going home for Lita involved residence in the
far end of the other village, necessitating a complete change
of friends. The novelty of the new group and new interests
kept her from in any way chafing at the change. Sala, a
stupid idle girl, had eloped from the household of the pastor.

[258]

APPENDIX II

METHODOLOGY OF THIS STUDY

It is impossible to present a single and unified picture of
the adolescent girl in Samoa and at the same time to answer
most satisfactorily the various kinds of questions which such
a study will be expected to answer. For the ethnologist in
search of data upon the usages and rites connected with ado-
lescence it is necessary to include descriptions of customs which
have fallen into partial decay under the impact of western
propaganda and foreign example. Traditional observances
and attitudes are also important in the study of the adolescent
girl in present-day Samoa because they still form a large part
of the thought pattern of her parents, even if they are no
longer given concrete expression in the girl's cultural life.
But this double necessity of describing not only the present
environment and the girl's reaction to it, but also of inter-
polating occasionally some description of the more rigid cul-
tural milieu of her mother's girlhood, mars to some extent
the unity of the study.

The detailed observations were all made upon a group of
girls living in three practically contiguous villages on one
coast of the island of Tau. The data upon the ceremonial
usages surrounding birth, adolescence and marriage were gath-
ered from all of the seven villages in the Manu'a Archipelago.

The method of approach is based upon the assumption that
a detailed intensive investigation will be of more value than
a more diffused and general study based upon a less accurate
knowledge of a greater number of individuals. Dr. Van
Waters' study of The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive

[259]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

Peoples has exhausted the possibilities of an investigation based
upon the merely external observations of the ethnologist vv^ho
is giving a standardised description of a primitive culture. We
have a huge mass of general descriptive material without the
detailed observations and the individual cases in the light of
which it would be possible to interpret it.

The writer therefore chose to work in one small locality,
in a group numbering only six hundred people, and spend six
months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of
all the adolescent girls in this community. As there were
only sixty-eight girls between the ages of nine and twenty,
quantitative statements are practically valueless for obvious
reasons: the probable error of the group is too large; the age
classes are too small, etc. The only point at which quantita-
tive statements can have any relevance is in regard to the
variability within the group, as the smaller the variability
within the sample, the greater the general validity of the
results.

Furthermore, the type of data which we needed is not of
the sort which lends itself readily to quantitative treatment.
The reaction of the girl to her stepmother, to relatives acting
as foster parents, to her younger sister, or to her older brother,
— these are incommensurable in quantitative terms. As the
physician and the psychiatrist have found it necessary to describe
each case separately and to use their cases as illumination of a
thesis rather than as irrefutable proof such as it is possible to
adduce in the physical sciences, so the student of the more in-
tangible and psychological aspects of human behaviour is
forced to illuminate rather than demonstrate a thesis. The
composition of the background against which the girl acts can
be described in accurate and general terms, but her reactions
are a function of her own personality and cannot be described
without reference to it. The generalisations are based upon
a careful and detailed observation of a small group of sub-

[260]

APPENDIX II

jects. These results will be illuminated and illustrated by
case histories.

The conclusions are also all subject to the limitation of the
personal equation. They are the judgments of one individual
upon a mass of data, many of the most significant aspects of
which can, by their very nature, be known only to herself.
This was inevitable and it can only be claimed in extenuation
that as the personal equation was held absolutely constant, the
different parts of the data are strictly commensurable. The
judgment on the reaction of Lola to her uncle and of Sona
to her cousin are made on exactly the same basis.

Another methodological device which possibly needs expla-
nation is the substitution of a cross sectional study for a linear
one. Twenty-eight children who as yet showed no signs of
puberty, fourteen children who would probably mature within
the next year or year and a half, and twenty-five girls who
had passed puberty within the last four years but were not yet
classed by the community as adults^ were studied in detail.
Less intensive observations were also made upon the very little
children and the young married women. Thus_jmethod^ of
taking cross sections, samples of individuals at different periods
j of physic al development, and arguing that a^roup in a n earHer
stage jyilj_ljter_show„th^e__chajj.cter istics which appe ar in an-
other group at a later stage,^s, of course, inferior to a l inear
Ijudyjnjwhichjhe same group is under observatioxL^or a XLum-
^er of years. A very large number of cases has usually been
the only acceptable defence of such a procedure. The num-
ber of cases included in this investigation, while very small
in comparison with the numbers mustered by any student of
American children, is nevertheless a fair-sized sample in terms
of the very small population of Samoa (a rough eight thou-
sand in all four islands of American Samoa) and because the
only selection was geographical. It may further be argued
that the almost drastic character of the conclusions, the exceed-

[261]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

ingly few exceptions which need to be made, further validate
the size of the sample. The adoption of the cross section
method was, of course, a matter of expediency, but the results
when carefully derived from a fair sample, may be fairly
compared with the results obtained by using the linear method,
when the same subjects are under observation over a period of
years. This is true when the conclusions to be drawn are gen-
eral and not individual. For the purposes of psychological
theory, it is sufficient to know that children in a certain society
walk, on the average, at twelve months, and talk, on the aver-
age, at fifteen months. For the purposes of the diagnostician,
it is necessary to know that John walked at eighteen months
and did not talk until twenty months. So, for general theo-
retical purposes, it is enough to state that little girls just past
puberty develop a shyness and lack of self-possession in the
presence of boys, but if we are to understand the delinquency
of Mala, it is necessary to know that she prefers the company
of boys to that of girls and has done so for several years.

PARTICULAR METHODS USED

The description of the cultural background was obtained
in orthodox fashion, first through interviews with carefully
chosen informants, followed by checking up their statements
with other informants and by thq use of many examples and
test cases. With a few unimportant" exceptions this material
was obtained in the Samoan language and not through the
medium of interpreters. All of the work with individuals
was done in the native language, as there were no young peo-
ple on the island who spoke English.

Although a knowledge of the entire culture was essential
for the accurate evaluation of any particular individual's be-
haviour, a detailed description will be given only of those
aspects of the culture which are immediately relevant to the

[262]

APPENDIX II

problem of the adolescent girl. For example, if I observe
Pele refuse point blank to carry a message to the house of a
relative, it is important to know whether she is actuated by
stubbornness, dislike of the relative, fear of the dark, or fear
of the ghost which lives near by and has a habit of jumping
on people's backs. But to the reader a detailed exposition of
the names and habits of all the local ghost population would
be of little assistance in the appreciation of the main problem.
So all descriptions of the culture which are not immediately
relevant are omitted from the discussion but were not omitted
from the original investigation. Their irrelevancy has, there-
fore, been definitely ascertained.

The knowledge of the general cultural pattern was sup-
plemented by a detailed study of the social structure of the
three villages under consideration. Each household was ana-
lysed from the standpoint of rank, wealth, location, contiguity
to other households, relationship to other households, and the
age, sex, relationship, marital status, number of children,
former residence, etc., of each individual in the household.
This material furnished a general descriptive basis for a fur-
ther and more careful analysis of the households of the sub-
jects, and also provided a check on the origin of feuds or al-
liances between individuals, the use of relationship terms, etc.
Each child was thus studied against a background which was
known in detail.

A further mass of detailed information was obtained about
the subjects: approximate age (actual age can never be deter-
mined in Samoa), order of birth, numbers of brothers and
sisters, who were older and younger than the subject, number
of marriages of each parent, patrilocal and matrilocal resi-
dence, years spent in the pastor's school and in the government
school and achievement there, whether the child had ever been
out of the village or oif the island, sex experience, etc. The
children were also given a makeshift intelligence test, colour-

[263]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

naming, rote memory, opposites, substitution, ball and field,
and picture interpretation. These tests were all given in
Samoan; standardisation was, of course, impossible and ages
were known only relatively; they were mainly useful in assist-
ing me in placing the child within her group, and have no
value for comparative purposes. The results of the tests did
indicate, however, a very low variability within the group.
The tests were supplemented by a questionnaire which was not
administered formally but filled in by random questioning
from time to time. This questionnaire gave a measure of
their industrial knowledge, the extent to which they partici-
pated in the lore of the community, of the degree to which
they had absorbed European teaching in matters like telling
time, reading the calendar, and also of the extent to which
they had participated in or witnessed scenes of death, birth,
miscarriage, etc.

But this quantitative data represents the barest skeleton of
the material which was gathered through months of observa-
tion of the individuals and of groups, alone, in their house-
holds, and at play. From these observations, the bulk of the
conclusions are drawn concerning the attitudes of the children
towards their families and towards each other, their religious
interests or the lack of them, and the details of their sex lives.
This information cannot be reduced to tables or to statistical
statements. Naturally in many cases it was not as full as in
others. In some cases it was necessary to pursue a more exten-
sive enquiry in order to understand some baffling aspect of the
child's behaviour. In all cases the investigation was pursued
iintil I felt that I understood the girl's motivation and the
degree to which her family group and affiliation in her age
group explained her attitudes.

The existence of the pastor's boarding-school for girls past
puberty provided me with a rough control group. These girls
were so severely watched that heterosexual activities were im-

[264]

APPENDIX II

possible; they were grouped together with other girls of the
sam age regardless of relationship; they ved a more ordered
and regular life than the girls who remained in their house-
holds. The ways in which they differed from other girls of
the same age and more resembled European girls of the same
age follow with surprising accuracy the lines suggested by the
specific differences in environment. However, as they lived
part of the time at home, the environmental break was not
complete and their value as a control group is strictly limited.

[265]

^

APPENDIX III

SAMOAN CIVILISATION AS IT IS TO-DAY

The scene of this study was the little island of Tau. Along
one coast of the island, which rises precipitately to a mountain
peak in the centre, cluster three little villages, Luma and
Siufaga, side by side, and Faleasao, half a mile away. On
the other end of the island is the isolated village of Fitiuta,
separated from the other three villages by a long and arduous
trail. Many of the people from the other villages have never
been to Fitiuta, eight miles away. Twelve miles across the
open sea are the two islands of Ofu and Olesega, which with
Taij, make up the Manu'a Archipelago, the most primitive
part of Samoa. Journeys in slender outrigger canoes from
one of these three little islands to another are frequent, and
the inhabitants of Manu'a think of themselves as a unit as
over against the inhabitants of Tutuila, the large island where
the Naval Station is situated. The three islands have a popu-
lation of a little over two thousand people, with constant
visiting, inter-marrying, adoption going on between the seven
villages of the Archipelago.

The natives still live in their beehive-shaped houses with
floors of coral rubble, no walls except perishable woven blinds
which are lowered in bad weather, and a roof of sugar-cane
thatch over which it is necessary to bind palm branches in
every storm. They have substituted cotton cloth for their
laboriously manufactured bark cloth for use as everyday
clothing, native costume being reserved for ceremonial occa-
sions. But the men content themselves with a wide cotton
loin cloth, the lavalava, fastened at the waist with a dexterous

[266]

APPENDIX III

twist of the material. This costume permits a little of the
tattooing which covers their bodies from knee to the small of
the back, to appear above and below the folds of the lavalava.
Tattooing has been taboo on Manu'a for two generations,
so only a part of the population have made the necessary jour-
ney to another island in search of a tattooer. Women wear a
longer lavalava and a short cotton dress falling to their knees.
Both sexes go barefoot and hats are worn only to Church, on
which occasions the men don white shirts and white coats,
ingeniously tailored by the native women in imitation of Palm
Beach coats which have fallen into their hands. The women's
tattooing is much sparser than the men's, a mere matter of
dots and crosses on arms, hands, and thighs. Garlands of
flowers, flowers in the hair, and flowers twisted about the
ankles, serve to relieve the drabness of the faded cotton cloth-
ing, and on gala days, beautifully patterned bark cloth, fine
mats, gaily bordered with red parrot feathers, headdresses of
human hair decorated with plumes and feathers, recall the
more picturesque attire of pre-Christian days.

Sewing-machines have been in use for many years, although
the natives are still dependent upon some deft-handed sailor
for repairs. Scissors have also been added to the household
equipment, but wherever possible a Samoan woman still uses
her teeth or a piece of bamboo. At the Missionary boarding-
schools a few of the women have learned to crochet and
embroider, using their skill particularly to ornament the
plump, hard pillows which are rapidly displacing the little
bamboo head rests. Sheets of white cotton have taken the
place of sheets of firmly woven mats or of bark cloth. Mos-
quito nets of cotton netting make a native house much more
endurable than must have been the case when bark cloth tents
were the only defence against insects. The netting is sus-
pended at night from stout cords hung across the house, and
the edges weighted down with stones, so that prowling dogs,

[267]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

pigs, and chickens wander through the house at will without
disturbing the sleepers.

Agate buckets share with hollowed cocoanut shells the work
of bringing water from the springs and from the sea, and
a few china cups and glasses co-operate with the cocoanut
drinking cups. Many households have an iron cook pot in
which they can boil liquids in preference to the older method
of dropping red hot stones into a wooden vessel containing the
liquid to be heated. Kerosene lamps and lanterns are used
extensively; the old candle-nut clusters and cocoanut oil
lamps being reinstated only in times of great scarcity when
they cannot aiford to purchase kerosene. Tobacco is a much-
prized luxury; the Samoans have learned to grow it, but im-
ported varieties are very much preferred to their own.

Outside the household the changes wrought by the intro-
duction of European articles are very slight. The native uses
an iron knife to cut his copra and an iron adze blade in place
of the old stone one. But he still binds the rafters of his
house together with cinet and sews the parts of his fishing
canoes together. The building of large canoes has been aban-
doned. Only small canoes for fishing are built now, and for
hauling supplies over the reef the natives build keeled row-
boats. Only short voyages are made in small canoes and row-
boats, and the natives wait for the coming of the Naval ship
to do their travelling. The government buys the copra and
with the money so obtained the Samoans buy cloth, thread,
kerosene, soap, matches, knives, belts, and tobacco, pay their
taxes (levied on every man over a certain height as age is an
indeterminate matter), and support the church.

And yet, while the Samoans use these products of a more
complex civilisation, they are not dependent upon them. With
the exception of making and using stone tools, it is probably
safe to say that none of the native arts have been lost. The
women all make bark cloth and weave fine mats. Parturition

[268]

APPENDIX III

still takes place on a piece of bark cloth, the umbilical cord is
cut with a piece of bamboo, and the new baby is wrapped in
a specially prepared piece of white bark cloth. If soap can-
not be obtained, the wild orange provides a frothy substitute.
The men still manufacture their own nets, make their own
hooks, weave their own eel traps. And although they use
matches when they can get them, they have not lost the art
of converting a carrying stick into a fire plow at a moment's
notice.

Perhaps most important of all is the fact that they still
depend entirely upon their own foods, planted with a sharp-
ened pole in their own plantations. Breadfruit, bananas, taro,
yams, and cocoanuts form a substantial and monotonous ac-
companiment for the fish, shell fish, land crabs, and occasional
pigs and chickens. The food is carried down to the village
in baskets, freshly woven from palm leaves. The cocoanuts
are grated on the end of a wooden "horse," pointed with
shell or iron; the breadfruit and taro are supported on a
short stake, tufted with cocoanut husk, and the rind is grated
off with a piece of cocoanut shell. The green bananas are
skinned with a bamboo knife. The whole amount of food
for a family of fifteen or twenty for two or three days is
cooked at once in a large circular pit of stones. These are
iirst heated to white heat; the ashes are then raked away; the
food placed on the stones and the oven covered with green
leaves, under which the food is baked thoroughly. Cooking
over, the food is stored in baskets which are hung up inside
the main house. It is served on palm leaf platters, garnished
with a fresh banana leaf. Fingers are the only knives and
forks, and a wooden finger bowl is passed ceremoniously about
at the end of the meal.

Furniture, with the exception of a few chests and cupboards,
has not invaded the house. All life goes on on the floor.
Speaking on one's feet within the house is still an unforgivable

[269]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMCA

breach of etiquette, and the visitor must learn to sit cross-
legged for hours without murmuring.

The Samoans have been Christian for almost a hundred
years. With the exception of a small number of Catholics
and Mormons, all the natives of American Samoa are ad-
herents of the London Missionary Society, known in Samoa
as the "Church of Tahiti," from its local origin. The Con-
gregationalist missionaries have been exceedingly successful in
adapting the stern doctrine and sterner ethics of a British
Protestant sect to the widely divergent attitudes of a group
of South Sea islanders. In the Missionary boarding-schools
they have trained many boys as native pastors and as mission-
aries for other islands, and many girls to be the pastors' wives.
The pastor's house is the educational as well as the religious
centre of the village. In the pastor's school the children learn
to read and write their own language, to which the early mis-
sionaries adapted our script, to do simple sums and sing hymns.
The missionaries have been opposed to teaching the natives
English, or in any way weaning them away from such of the
simplicity of their primitive existence as they have not ac-
counted harmful. Accordingly, although the elders of the
church preach excellent sermons and in many cases have an
extensive knowledge of the Bible (which has been translated
into Samoan), although they keep accounts, and transact
lengthy business aifairs, they speak no English, or only very
little of it. On Tau there were never more than half a
dozen individuals at one time who had any knowledge of
English.

The Naval Government has adopted the most admirable
policy of benevolent non-interference in native affairs. It
establishes dispensaries and conducts a hospital where native
nurses are trained. These nurses are sent out into the villages
where they have surprising success in the administration of the
very simple remedies at their command, castor oil, iodine,

[270]

APPENDIX III

argyrol, alcohol rubs, etc. Through periodic administrations
of salvarsan the more conspicuous symptoms of yaws are rap-
idly disappearing. And the natives are learning to come to
the dispensaries for medicine rather than aggravate conjunc-
tivitis to blindness by applying irritating leaf poultices to the
inflamed eyes.

Reservoirs have been constructed in most of the villages,
providing an unpolluted water supply at a central fountain
where all the washing and bathing is done. Copra sheds in
each village store the copra until the government ship comes
to fetch it. Work on copra sheds, on village boats used in
hauling the copra over the reef, on roads between villages, on
the repairs of the water system, is carried through by a levy
upon the village as a whole, conforming perfectly to the na-
tive pattern of communal work. The government operates
through appointed district governors and county chiefs, and
elected "mayors" in each village. The administrations of
these officials are peaceful and effective in proportion to the
importance of their rank in the native social organisation.
Each village also has two policemen who act as town criers,
couriers on government inspections, and carriers of the nurses'
equipment from village to village. There are also county
judges. A main court is presided over by an American civil
judge and a native judge. The penal code is a random com-
bination of government edicts, remarkable for their tolerance
of native custom. When no pronouncement on a point of
law is found in this code, the laws of the state of California,
liberally interpreted and revised, are used to provide a legal-
istic basis for the court's decision. These courts have taken
over the settlement of disputes concerning important titles,
and property rights; and the chief causes of litigation in the
"courthouse" at Pago Pago are the same which agitated the
native fonos some hundred years ago.

Schools are now maintained in many villages, where the

[271]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

children, seated cross-legged on the floor of a large native
house, learn the haziest of English from boys whose knowl-
edge of the language is little more extensive than theirs.
They also learn part singing, at which they are extraordinarily
adept, and to play cricket and many other games. The schools
are useful in instilling elementary ideas of hygiene, and in
breaking down the barriers between age and sex groups and
narrow residential units. From the pupils in the outlying
schools the most promising are selected to become nurses,
teachers, and candidates for the native marine corps, the
FkafitaSj who constitute the police, hospital corpsmen and in-
terpreters for the naval administration. The Samoans' keen
feeling for social distinction makes them particularly able to
co-operate with a government in which there is a hierarchy
of oflScialdom; the shoulder stars and bars are fitted into their
own system of rank without confusion. When the Governor
and group of officers pay an official visit, the native-talking
chief distributes the kava, first to the Governor, then to the
highest chief among the hosts, then to the Commander of the
Naval Yard, then to the next highest chief, without any diffi-
culty.

In all the descriptions of Samoan life, one of the points
which must have struck the reader most forcibly is the ex-
treme flexibility of the civilisation as it is found to-day. This
flexibility is the result of the blending of the various European
ideas, beliefs, mechanical devices, with the old primitive cul-
ture. It is impossible to say whether it is due to some genius
in the Samoan culture itself, or to fortunate accident, that
these foreign elements have received such a thorough and
harmonious acculturation. In many parts of the South Seas
contact with white civilisation has resulted in the complete
degeneration of native life, the loss of native techniques,
and traditions, and the annihilation of the past. In Samoa
this is not so. The growing child is faced by a smaller

[272]

APPENDIX III

dilemma than that which confronts the American-born child
of European parentage. The gap between parents and chil-
dren is narrow and painless, showing few of the unfortunate
aspects usually present in a period of transition. The new cul-
ture, by offering alternative careers to the children has some-
what lightened the parental yoke. But essentially the children
are still growing up in a homogeneous community with a uni-
form set of ideals and aspirations. The present ease of ado-
lescence among Samoan girls which has been described cannot
safely be attributed to a period of transition. The fact that
adolescence can be a period of unstressed development is just
as significant. Given no additional outside stimulus or attempt
to modify conditions, Samoan culture might remain very much
the same for two hundred years.

But it is only fair to point out that Samoan culture, before
white influence, was less flexible and dealt less kindly with the
individual aberrant. Aboriginal Samoa was harder on the girl
sex delinquent than is present-day Samoa. And the reader
must not mistake the conditions which have been described for
the aboriginal ones, nor for typical primitive ones. Present-
day Samoan civilisation is simply the result of the fortuitous
and on the whole fortunate impetus of a complex, intrusive
culture upon a simpler and most hospitable indigenous one.

In former times, the head of the household had life and
death powers over every individual under his roof. The
American legal system and the missionary teachings between
them have outlawed and banished these rights. The indi-
vidual still benefits by the communal ownership of property,
by the claims which he has on all family land; but he no
longer suffers from an irksome tyranny which could be en-
forced with violence and possible death. Deviations from
chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls by a very
severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head. Mis-
sionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but

[273]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

failed to substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect
conduct. The girl whose sex activities are frowned upon by
her family is in a far better position than that of her great-
grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has inter-
dicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part
of the marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent
inducement to virginity has been abolished. If for these
cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a stricter regime
there had been substituted a religious system which seriously
branded the sex oifender, or a legal system which prosecuted
and punished her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have
been as heavily fraught with possibilities of conflict as the old
civilisation undoubtedly was.

This holds true also for the ease with which young people
change their residence. Formerly it might have been neces-
sary to flee to a great distance to avoid being beaten to death.
Now the severe beatings are deprecated, but the running-away
pattern continues. The old system of succession must have
produced many heartburns in the sons who did not obtain the
best titles; to-day two new professions are open to the ambi-
tious, the ministry and the Fitafitas. The taboo system, al-
though never as rigorous in Samoa as in other parts of Poly-
nesia, undoubtedly compelled the people to lead more circum-
spect lives and stressed more vividly diflFerence in rank. The
few economic changes which have been introduced have been
just suflficient to slightly upset the system of prestige which
was based on display and lavish distribution of property. Ac-
quiring wealth is easier, through raising copra, government
employment, or manufacturing curios for the steamer-tourist
trade on the main island. Many high chiefs do not find it
worth while to keep up the state to which they are entitled,
while numerous upstarts have an opportunity to acquire pres-
tige denied to them under a slower method of accumulating
wealth. The intensity of local feeling with its resulting

[274]

APPENDIX III

feuds, wars, jealousies and conflicts (in the case of inter-
marriage between villages) is breaking down with the im-
proved facilities for transportation and the co-operation be-
tween villages in religious and educational matters.

Superior tools have partially done away with the tyranny of
the master craftsman. The man who is poor, but ambitious,
finds it easier to acquire a guest house than it would have
been when the laborious highly specialised work was done
with stone tools. The use of some money and of cloth, pur-
chased from traders, has freed women from part of the im-
mense labour of manufacturing mats and tapa as units of
exchange and for clothing. On the other hand, the introduc-
tion of schools has taken an army of useful little labourers
out of the home, especially in the case of the little girls who
cared for the babies, and so tied the adult women more closely
to routine domestic tasks.

Puberty was formerly much more stressed than it is to-day.
The menstrual taboos against participation in the kava cere-
mony and in certain kinds of cooking were felt and enforced.
The girl's entrance into the Aualuma was always, not just
occasionally, marked by a feast. The unmarried girls and
the widows slept, at least part of the time, in the house of
the taufo. The taufo herself had a much harder life. To-
day she pounds the kava root, but in her mother's day it was
chewed until jaws ached from the endless task. Formerly,
should a defection from chastity be disclosed at her marriage,
she faced being beaten to death. The adolescent boy faced tat-
tooing, a painful, wearisome proceeding, additionally stressed
by group ceremony and taboo. To-day, scarcely half of the
young men are tattooed; the tattooing is performed at a much
more advanced age and has no connection with puberty; the
ceremonies have vanished and it has become a mere matter of
a fee to the artist.

The prohibitions against blood revenge and personal vio-

[275]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

lence have worked like a yeast in giving greater personal free-
dom. As many of the crimes which were formerly punished
in this fashion are not recognised as crimes by the new au-
thorities, no new mechanism of punishment has been devised
for the man who marries the divorced wife of a man of
higher rank, the miscreant who gossips outside his village and
so brings his village into disrepute, the insolent detractor who
recites another's genealogy, or the naughty boy who removes
the straws from the pierced cocoanuts and thus offers an un-
speakable affront to visitors. And the Samoan is not in the
habit of committing many of the crimes listed in our legal
code. He steals and is fined by the government as he was
formerly fined by the village. But he comes into very slight
conflict with the central authorities. He is too accustomed to
taboos to mind a quarantine prohibition which parades under
the same guise; too accustomed to the exactions of his rela-
tions to fret under the small taxation demands of the govern-
ment. Even the stern attitude formerly taken by the adults
towards precocity has now been subdued, for what is a sin at
home becomes a virtue at school.

The new influences have drawn the teeth of the old cul-
ture. Cannibalism, war, blood revenge, the life and death
power of the matai^ the punishment of a man who broke a
village edict by burning his house, cutting down his trees,
killing his pigs, and banishing his family, the cruel defloration
ceremony, the custom of laying waste plantations on the way
to a funeral, the enormous loss of life in making long voy-
ages in small canoes, the discomfort due to widespread disease
— all these have vanished. And as yet their counterparts in
producing misery have not appeared.

Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separa-
tion of the worker from his land and from his tools, modern
warfare, industrial disease, the abolition of leisure, the irk-
someness of a bureaucratic government — these have not yet

[276]

APPENDIX III

invaded an island without resources worth exploiting. Nor
have the subtler penalties of civilisation, neuroses, philosophical
perplexities, the individual tragedies due to an increased con-
sciousness of personality and to a greater specialisation of sex
feeling, or conflicts between religion and other ideals, reached
the natives. The Samoans have only taken such parts of our
culture as made their life more comfortable, their culture
more flexible, the concept of the mercy of God without the
doctrine of original sin.

[277]

APPENDIX IV

THE MENTALLY DEFECTIVE AND THE MENTALLY
DISEASED

Without any training in the diagnosis of the mentally dis-
eased and without any apparatus for exact diagnosis of the
mentally defective, I can simply record a number of amateur
observations which may be of interest to the specialist inter-
ested in the possibilities of studying the pathology of primitive
peoples. In the Manu'a Archipelago with a population of a lit-
tle over two thousand people, I saw one case which would
be classed as-idiocy, one imbecile, one boy of fourteen who
appeared to be both feeble-minded and insane, one man of
thirty who showed a well-systematised delusion of grandeur,
and one sexual invert who approximated in a greater develop-
ment of the breasts, mannerism and attitudes of women and
a preference for women's activities, to the norm of the oppo-
site sex. The idiot child was one of seven children; he had
a younger brother who had walked for over a year, and the
mother declared that there were two years between the chil-
dren. His legs were shrunken and withered, he had an enor-
mous belly and a large head set very low on his shoulders. He
could neither walk nor talk, drooled continually, and had no
command over his excretory functions. The imbecile girl
lived on another island and I had no opportunity to observe
her over any length of time. She was one or two years past
puberty and was pregnant at the time that I saw her. She
could talk and perform the simple tasks usually performed by
children of five or six. She seemed to only half realise her
condition and giggled foolishly or stared vacantly when it was

[278]

APPENDIX IV

mentioned. The fourteen-year-old boy was at the time when
I saw him definitely demented, giving an external picture of
catatonic dementia pra^cox. He took those attitudes which
were urged upon him, at times, however, becoming violent and
unmanageable. The relatives insisted that he had always been
stupid but only recently become demented. For this I have
only their word as I was only able to observe the boy during
a few days. In no one of these three cases of definite mental
deficiency was there any family history which threw any light
upon the matter. Among the girls whom I studied in detail
only one, Sala, discussed in Chapter X, was sufficiently inferior
to the general norm of intelligence to approximate to a m oron .

The man with the systematised delusion of grandeur was
said to be about thirty years of age. Gaunt and emaciated,
he looked much older. He believed that he was Tufele, the
high chief of another island and the governor of the entire
archipelago. The natives conspired against him to rob him of
his rank and to exalt an usurper in his stead. He was a mem-
ber of the Tufele family but only very remotely so that his
delusion bore no relation to reality as he would never have
had any hope of succeeding to the title. The natives, he said,
refused to give him food, mocked him, disallowed his claims,
did their best to destroy him, while a few white people were
wise enough to recognise his rank. (The natives instructed
visitors to address him in the chief's language because he con-
sented to dance, a weird pathetic version of the usual style,
only when so opportuned.) He had no outbreaks of violence,
was morose, recessive, only able to work at times and never
able to do heavy work or to be trusted to carry through any
complicated task. He was treated with universal gentleness
and toleration by his relatives and neighbours.

From informants I obtained accounts of four cases on
Tutuila which sounded like the manic stage of manic de-
pressive insanity. All four of these individuals had been vio-

[279]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

lently destructive, and uncontrollable for a period of time, but
had later resumed what the natives considered normal func-
tioning. An old woman who had died some ten years before
was said to have compulsively complied with any command
that was given her. There was one epileptic boy in Tau, a
member of an otherwise normal family of eight children.
He fell from a tree during a seizure and died from a frac-
tured skull soon after I came to Manu'a. A little girl of
about ten who was paralysed from the waist down was said to
be suffering from an overdose of salvarsan and to have been
normal until she was live or six years old.

Only two individuals, one a married woman of thirty or
so, the other a girl of nineteen, discussed in Chapter X, showed
a definite neurasthenic constitution. The married woman was
barren and spent a great deal of time explaining her barren-
ness as need of an operation. The presence of an excellent
surgeon at the Samoan hospital during the preceding two years
had greatly enhanced the prestige -of operations. On Tutuila,
near the Naval Station, I encountered several middle-aged
women obsessed with operations which they had undergone
or were soon to undergo. Whether this vogue of modern
surgery, by giving it special point, has added to the amount
of apparent neurasthenia or not, it is impossible to say.

Of hysterical manifestations, I encountered only one, a
girl of fourteen or fifteen with a bad tic in the right side of
her face. I only saw her for a few minutes on a journey
and was unable to make any investigations. I neither saw
nor heard of any cases of hysterical blindness or deafness, nor
or any anaesthesias nor paralyses.

I saw no cases of cretinism. There were a few children
who had been blind from birth. Blindness, due to the ex-
tremely violent methods used by the native practitioners in
the treatment of "Samoan conjunctivitis," is common.

The pathology which is immediately apparent to any visitor

[280]

APPENDIX IV

in a Samoan village is mainly due to the diseased eyes, ele-
phantiasis, and abscesses and sores of various sorts, but the stig-
mata of degeneration are almost entirely absent.

There was one albino, a girl of ten, with no albinism in
the recorded family history, but as one parent, now dead, had
come from another island, this was not at all conclusive data.

[281]

APPENDIX V

MATERIALS UPON WHICH THE ANALYSIS IS BASED

This study included sixty-eight girls between the ages of
eight and nine and nineteen or twenty — all the girls between
these ages in the three villages of Faleasao, Luma and Siufaga,
the three villages on the west coast of the island of Tau in
the Manu'a Archipelago of the Samoan Islands.

Owing to the impossibility of obtaining accurate dates of
birth except in a very few cases, the ages must all be regarded
as approximate. The approximations were based upon the few
known ages and the testimony of relatives as to the relative
age of the others. For purpose of description and analysis I
have divided them roughly into three groups, the children who
showed no mammary signs of puberty, twenty-eight in num-
ber, ranging in age from eight or nine to about twelve or
thirteen; the children who would probably mature within the
next year or year and a half, fourteen in number, ranging in
age from twelve or thirteen to fourteen or fifteen; and the
girls who were past puberty, but who were not yet considered
as adults by the community, twenty-five in number, ranging
in age from fourteen or fifteen to nineteen or twenty. These
two latter groups and eleven of the younger children were
studied in detail, making a group of fifty. The remaining
fourteen children in the youngest group were studied less care-
fully as individuals. They formed a large check group in
studying play, gang life, the development of brother and
sister avoidance, the attitude between the sexes, the difiFerence
in the interests and activities of this age and the girls ap-
proaching puberty. They also provided abundant material for

[282]

APPENDIX V

the study of the education and discipline of the child in the
home. The two tables present in summary form the major
statistical facts which were gathered about the children spe-
cially studied, order of birth, number of brothers and sisters,
death or remarriage or divorce of parents, residence of the
child, type of household in which the child lived and whether
the girl was the daughter of the head of the household or not.
The second table relates only to the twenty-five girls past
puberty and gives length of time since first menstruation, fre-
quency of menstruation, amount and location of menstrual
pain, the presence or absence of masturbation, homosexual and
heterosexual experience, and the very pertinent fact of resi-
dence or non-residence in the pastor's household. A survey
of the summary analyses joined to these tables will show that
these fifty girls present a fairly wide range in family organi-
sation, order of birth, and relation to parents. The group
may be fairly considered as representative of the various types
of environment, personal and social, which are found in
Samoan civilisation as it is to-day.

DISTRIBUTION OF GROUP OF ADOLESCENTS IN RELATION TO
FIRST MENSTRUATION

Within last six months 6

Within last year 3

Within last two years 5

Within last three years 7

Within last four years 3

Within last five years I

Total 25

[283]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

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COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

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[286]

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APPENDIX V

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[287]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

KEY TO TABLE ON FAMILY STRUCTURE

Column Subject

1 Number of older brothers

2 Number of older sisters

3 Number of younger brothers

4 Number of younger sisters

5 Half brother, fluSy number older, minus, number

younger

6 Half sister, fluSy number older, m-inuSj number

younger

7 Mother dead

8 Father dead

9 Child of mother's second marriage

10 Child of father's second marriage

1 1 Mother remarried
.12 Father remarried

13 Residence with both parents and patrilocal

14 Residence with both parents and matrilocal

15 Residence with mother only

16 Residence with father only

17 Parents divorced

18 Residence with paternal relatives

19 Residence with maternal relatives

20 Father is m-atai of household

21 Residence in a biological family, i.e., household of

parents, children, and no more than two additional
relatives.

X in the table means the presence of trait. For example, x
in column 7 means that the mother is dead.

[288]

I
I

APPENDIX V

ANALYSIS OF TABLE ON FAMILY STRUCTURE

There were among the sixty-eight girls:

7 only children

15 youngest children

5 oldest children

5 with half brother or sister in the same household

5 whose mother was dead

14 whose father was dead

3 who were children of mother's second marriage
2 children of father's second marriage

7 whose mother had remarried

5 whose father had remarried

4 residence with both parents patrilocal

8 residence with both parents matrilocal

9 residence with mother only
I residence with father only
7 parents divorced

12 residence with paternal relatives (without either
parent)

6 residence with maternal relatives (without either

parent)
15, or 30%, whose fathers were heads of households
12 who belonged to a qualified biological family (i.e.,
a family which during my stay on the island com-
prised only two relatives beside the parents and
children).

INTELLIGENCE TESTS USED

It was impossible to standardise any intelligence tests and
consequently my results are quantitatively valueless. But as
I had had some experience in the diagnostic use of tests, I
found them useful in forming a preliminary estimate of the

[289]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

girls' intelligence. Also, the natives have long been accus-
tomed to examinations which the missionary authorities con-
duct each year, and the knowledge that an examination is in
progress makes them respect the privacy of investigator and
subject. In this way it was possible for me to get the chil-
dren alone, without antagonising their parents. Furthermore,
the novelty of the tests, especially the colour-naming and
picture interpretation tests, served to divert their attention
from other questions which I wished to ask them. The re-
sults of the tests showed a much narrower range than would
be expected in a group varying in age from ten to twenty.
Without any standardisation it is impossible to draw any more
detailed conclusions. I shall, however, include a few com-
ments about the peculiar responses which the girls made to
particular tests, as I believe such comment is useful in evaluat-
ing intelligence testing among primitive peoples and also in
estimating the possibilities of such testing.

Tests Used

Colour Naming. lOO half -inch squares, red, yellow,
black and blue.

Rote Memory for Digits. Customary Stanford Binet
directions were used.

Digit Symbol Substitution. 72 one-inch figures, square,
circle, cross, triangle and diamond.

Opposites. 23 words. Stimulus words: fat, white, long,
old, tall, wise, beautiful, late, night, near, hot, win,
thick, sweet, tired, slow, rich, happy, darkness, up,
inland, inside, sick.

Picture Interpretation. Three reproductions from the
moving picture Moana, showing, (a) Two children
who had caught a cocoanut crab by smoking it out of
the rocks above them, (b) A canoe putting out to sea
after bonito as evidenced by the shape of the canoe

[290]

I

APPENDIX V

and the position of the crew, (^r) A Samoan girl sitting
on a log eating a small live fish which a boy, gar-
landed and stretched on the ground at her feet, had
given her.
Ball and Field. Standard-sized circle.
Standard directions were given throughout in all cases en-
tirely in Samoan. Many children, unused to such definitely
set tasks, although all are accustomed to the use of slate and
of pencil and paper, had to be encouraged to start. The ball
and field test was the least satisfactory as in over fifty per
cent of the cases the children followed an accidental first line
and simply completed an elaborate pattern within the circle.
When this pattern happened by accident to be either the In-
ferior or Superior solution, the child's comment usually be-
trayed the guiding idea as aesthetic rather than as an attempt
to solve the problem. The children whom I was led to be-
lieve to be most intelligent, subordinated the zesthetic consid-
eration to the solution of the problem, but the less intelligent
children were sidetracked by their interest in the design they
could make much more easily than are children in our civili-
sation. In only two cases did I find a rote memory for digits
which exceeded six digits; two girls completing seven suc-
cessfully. The Samoan civilisation puts the slightest of pre-
miums upon rote memory of any sort. On the digit-symbol
test they were slow to understand the point of the test and
very few learned the combinations before the last line of the
test sheet. The picture interpretation test was the most sub-
ject to vitiation through a cultural factor; almost all of the
children adopted some highly stylized form of comment and
then pursued it through one balanced sentence after another:
"Beautiful is the boy and beautiful is the girl. Beautiful
is the garland of the boy and beautiful is the wreath of the
girl," etc. In the two pictures which emphasised human be-
ings no discussion could be commenced until the question of

[291]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA ?

the relationship of the characters had been ascertained. The
opposites test was the one which they did most easily, a natural
consequence of a vivid interest in words, an interest which
leads them to spend most of their mythological speculation
upon punning explanations of names.

CHECK LIST USED IN INVESTIGATION OF EACH
girl's EXPERIENCE

In order to standardise this investigation I made out a ques-
tionnaire which I filled out for each girl. The questions were''
not asked consecutively but from time to time I added one
item of information after another to the record sheets. The
various items fell into the loose groupings indicated below.

Agricultural froficiency. Weeding, selecting leaves for use
in cooking, gathering bananas, taro, breadfruit, cutting
cocoanuts for copra.

Cooking. Skinning bananas, grating cocoanut, preparing
breadfruit, mixing falusamiy^ wrapping falusamiy mak-
ing tafoloy\ making banana foiy making arrow-root
pudding.

Fishing. Daylight reef fishing, torchlight reef fishing, gath-
ering lolcy catching small fish on reef, using the "come
hither" octopus stick, gathering large crabs.

Weaving. Balls, pin-wheels, baskets to hold food gifts, carry-
ing baskets, woven blinds, floor mats, fishing baskets, food
trays, thatching mats, roof bonetting mats, plain fans,
pandanus floor mats, bed mats (number of designs known

* Palusami — a pudding prepared from grated cocoanut, flavoured
with red hot stone, mixed with sea water, and wrapped in taro leaves,
from which the acrid stem has been scorched, then in a banana leaf,
finally in a. breadfruit leaf.

t Tafolo — a pudding made of breadfruit with a sauce of grated
cocoanut.

[292]

APPENDIX V

and number of mats completed), fine mats, dancing
skirts, sugar-cane thatch.

Bark cloth making. Gathering paper mulberry wands, scrap-
ing the bark, pounding the bark, using a pattern board,
tracing patterns free hand.

Care of clothing. Washing, ironing, ironing starched clothes,
sewing, sewing on a machine, embroidering.

Athletics. Climbing palm trees, swimming, swimming in the
swimming hole within the reef,* playing cricket.

Kava making. Pounding the kava root, distributing the kava,
making the kava, shaking out the hibiscus bark strainer.

Proficiency in foreign things. Writing a letter, telling time,
reading a calendar, filling a fountain pen.

Dancing.

Reciting the family genealogy.

Index of knowledge of the courtesy language. Giving the
chiefs' words for: arm, leg, food, house, dance, wife,
sickness, talk, sit. Giving courtesy phrases of welcome,
when passing in front of some one.

Experience of life and death. Witnessing of birth, miscar-
riage, intercourse, death, Cresarian post-mortem opera-
tion.

Marital preferences^ rank, residence, age of marriage, number
of children.

Index of knowledge of the social organisation. Reason for
Cssarian post-mortem, proper treatment of a chief's bed,
exactions of the brother and sister taboo, penalties at-
tached to cocoanut tafuiy\ proper treatment of a kava

* Swimming- in the hole within the reef required more skill than
swimming in still water; it involved diving and also battling with a
water level which changed several feet with each great wave.

t Tapui. The hieroglj'phic signs used by the Samoans to protect
their property from thieves. The tapui calls down an automatic mag-
ical penalty upon the transgressor. The penalty for stealing from
property protected by the cocoanut tapui is boih.

[293]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

bowl, the titles and present incumbents of the titles of
the Manaia of Luma, Siufaga and Faleasao, the Taupo
of Fitiuta, the meaning of the Fale Ula * the Umu Sa, f
the Mua o le taule'ale'a, J the proper kinds of property
for a marriage exchange, who was the high chief of
Luma, Siufaga, Faleasao and Fitiuta, and what consti-
tuted the Lafo § of the talking chief.

* The ceremonial name of the council house of the Tui Manu'a.

■f* The sacred oven of food and the ceremony accompanying its pres-
entation and the presentation of fine mats to the carpenters who have
completed a new house.

$ The ceremonial call of the young men of the village upon a visit-
ing maiden.

§ The ceremonial perquisite of the talking chief, usually a piece of
tapa, occasionally a fine mat.

[294]

GLOSSARY OF NATIVE TERMS USED IN
THE TEXT

Aumaga ('aumaga) — the organisation of untitled men in each

Samoan village.
Aualuma — the organisation of unmarried girls past puberty,

wives of untitled men and u^idows.
Afafine — daughter (man speaking).
Aiga — relative.
Atali'i — son (man speaking).
Avaga — elopement.

Fa'alupega — the courtesy phrases, recited in formal speeches,
which embody the social pattern of each village.

Fale — house.

Faletua — "she who sits in the back of the house." The cour-
tesy term for a chief's wife.

Fono — a meeting. Specifically the organisation of titled men
of a village, district or island.

Fitafita — a member of the native marine corps.

Ifo — to lower oneself to some one whom one has offended or

injured.
Ifoga — the act of doing so.

Lavalava — a loin cloth, fastened by a twist in the material

at the waist.
Lole — a sort of jelly fish; applied by the natives to candy.

[295]

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA

Malaga — a travelling party; a journey.

Manaia — the heir-apparent of the principal chief; the 1" >•.>
of the Aumaga; the heir of any important citief v
title carries the privilege of giving a manaia titl ' 1.-
heir.

Matai — the holder of a title; the head of a househo''^

Moetotolo — surreptitious rape.

Moni — true, real.

Musu — unwillingness, obstinacy tov^^ards any course of action.

Olomatua — old woman.

Papalagi — white men; literally, "sky bursters." Foreig .
Pua — the frangipani tree.

Soa — a companion in circumcision- an ambassador in ve

affairs.
Soafafine — a woman ambassador in love affairs.
Siva — to dance; a dance.

Tama — a child, a son (woman speaking).

Tama — father.

Tamafafine — a child of the distaff side of the house.

Tamatane — a child of the male line.

Tapa — bark cloth.

Taule'ale'a — a member of the Aumaga; an untitled mui

Taupo — the village ceremonial hostess; the girl whom a high

chief has honoured with a title and a distribution of

property.
Tausi — the courtesy term for the wife of a talking chiel,

literally, "to care for."
Tei — a younger sibling.
Teine — a girl.
Teinetiti — a little girl.

[296]

GLOSSARY OF NATIVE TERMS

T:n;i- -mothe .

Toa'ina — an old man.

l^iafafin? — female sibling of a male.

Tuag^ne — male sibling of a female.

Tulafale — a talking chief.

t r

U 1- Dling of the same sex.

«jrE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF SAMOAN WORDS

The vowels are all pronounced as in Italian.
G i-> always pronounced like NG.
Th? Glottal stop is indicated by a (').

THE END

[297]

t/^^

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H

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